The Scorpions and Six Prisoners: The Shooting at Godinjske bare near Trnovo Recorded on Videotape

The Shooting near Trnovo

In July 1995, at the time of the fall of Srebrenica, members of the Scorpions unit brought six captured Bosniak men and young men by truck to Godinjske bare (also appearing in sources as Godinske bare or Godinska bara), a site about three kilometres southwest of Trnovo. According to the indictment, this took place on 16 or 17 July 1995; the 2007 judgments state only July 1995. The prosecution in Zagreb, relying on a date recorded on part of the footage, placed the event in June 1995, so the exact date remains disputed.

The prisoners were killed near an abandoned, burned-down house. They were:

• Safet Fejzić, born on 3 January 1978, was 17 years old;
• Azmir Alispahić, according to his mother was 16 years old, and according to other claims 17;
• Smail Ibrahimović, born in 1960, was 35 years old;
• Sidik Salkić, was 35 or 36 years old;
• Dino Salihović, was 18 years old;
• Juso Delić, was 25 years old.

Two of them, Safet Fejzić and Azmir Alispahić, were still children.

The Recording

One member of the unit, Slobodan Stojković, filmed the execution with a video camera. According to his testimony, he did so on the orders of the Scorpions commander Slobodan Medić, known as "Boca", which Medić denies. Stojković was not indicted.

For the next ten years, copies of the tape circulated among soldiers as a kind of "souvenirs". One even turned up in a video rental shop in Šid. During that time, the families of those killed did not know what had happened to their loved ones.

Exhumation and Identification

On 28 April 1999, remains were exhumed from an abandoned, partly destroyed and burned house about three kilometres southwest of Trnovo. The exhumation was led by Amor Mašović of the Federal Commission for Missing Persons. Safet Fejzić was identified by DNA analysis in 2003. By February 2007, Fejzić and Alispahić had been fully identified, while the others had been identified only preliminarily.

In April 2019, the Missing Persons Institute of BiH announced that two of the six victims had been identified from the Rogoj mass grave near Trnovo, exhumed in June 2018. This shows that not all of the remains were found at Godinjske bare.

The Tape's Path to The Hague

In November 2004, the recording came into the possession of the Humanitarian Law Center, led by Nataša Kandić. According to the Center, the tape was handed over by Dušan Kosanović, a member of the Scorpions, with Jovan Mirilo acting as intermediary.

At the trial of Slobodan Milošević before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague, the recording was shown on 1 June 2005, during the cross-examination of witness Obrad Stevanović. The screening deeply shook the public. The recording became one of the best-known pieces of evidence of crimes committed in July 1995.