AMSTERDAM, Nov 29: A Bosnian Serb was jailed for 20 years by the Hague war crimes tribunal on Friday for the cold-blooded 1992 murder of five Muslims who had begged for mercy.

Mitar Vasiljevic, a 48-year-old former waiter, was accused of belonging to a paramilitary group working with Serb military units and police in a reign of terror over the Muslim population around the eastern Bosnian town of Visegrad in 1992-94.

The case against him had centred on June 2, 1992, atrocities — the shooting dead by paramilitaries of five Bosnian Muslim men by the Drina River, and the burning alive of 65 Muslim women, children and old men locked in a house in eastern Bosnia.

Though the sentence was stiff, judges at the UN International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia found Vasiljevic guilty on only two counts — persecution and murder — and acquitted him on eight others.

Judges notably dismissed the prosecution charge that Vasiljevic was directly involved in a house burning on Pionirska Street in the Visegrad municipality.

They accepted Vasiljevic’s alibi that he was admitted to hospital at around the time of the atrocity, whose victims included babies and 46 members of one extended family.

Calling the Drina River murders a “cold-blooded execution”, judges dismissed Vasiljevic’s claim that he tried to persuade the paramilitary leader to spare the Muslims’ lives and found instead that the accused had turned a deaf ear to the victims.

“Pleas by the men for their lives were completely ignored by the accused,” Presiding Judge Anthony Hunt told the court as he issued the latest judgement to stem from the 1992-5 Bosnian war.

Though Vasiljevic played no significant role in the broader Balkans conflict, he was guilty of serious crimes motivated solely by sheer ethnic hatred, said Hunt.

The accused had denied six counts of crimes against humanity and four counts of war crimes after being arrested by NATO-led troops and transferred to The Hague in January 2000.

His trial began in September 2001.—Reuters