The verdict delivered by the Hague war crimes tribunal on Tuesday in the case of Momcilo Perisic, wartime Chief of the General Staff of the Yugoslav Army, for artillery attacks on Zagreb, is the second verdict of the UN court referring to the shelling of Zagreb on May 2-3, 1995, when seven people were killed and around one hundred were wounded.
In its latest judgement, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) found Perisic guilty of failing to punish the perpetrators of the artillery attacks on Zagreb in May 1995. In 2008, the court handed down a final verdict in the case of former Croatian Serb rebel leader Milan Martic, sentencing him to 35 years in prison, and one of the charges was the shelling of Zagreb.
Martic, former president of the self-styled Republic of Serb Krajina, was found responsible for personally ordering the artillery attacks on Zagreb. The trial chamber in his case established that densely populated areas in downtown Zagreb and around Zagreb airport were shelled indiscriminately from an Orkan multiple rocket launcher.
The trial chamber recalled at the time that Martic admitted in the media on several occasions that he had personally ordered the attacks on Zagreb in retaliation for the Croatian army operation Flash.
