The State Court of Bosnia has sentenced five former ethnic Serb police officers for committing war crimes against Bosniak civilians during the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina from 1992 to 1995.

Milan Gokić and Bratislav Trisić were sentenced to three years in prison, while Zoran Tanasić, Žarko Milanović, and Mladen Krajsnik were sentenced to two years in prison.

They were found guilty of torturing Bosniaks in the Bijeljina area in northeastern Bosnia from April 1992 to the end of September 1994, based on political, national, ethnic, cultural, and religious grounds.

The defendants were acquitted of charges of crimes against humanity, while three other defendants, Savo Mrsić, Milivoje Čobić, and Milan Marković, were acquitted of all charges.

Gokić was the police commander in Janja from late 1992 to June 1993 and later became deputy commander. Tanasić, Milanović, and Krajsnik were police officials in Janja, while Trisić was an official of the State Security Service.

Janja is located 10 kilometers south of Bijeljina.

The trial against them began in 2016, involving three other defendants, but two of them died during the trial, and authorities stated that the third defendant was unfit to stand trial due to illness.

A massacre occurred in Bijeljina in early April 1992 by local Serb paramilitaries and the Serbian Volunteer Guard, a paramilitary group led by Željko Ražnatović, known as Arkan. Up to 80 people, mostly Bosniaks but also ethnic Serbs suspected of being “collaborators”, were killed during the massacre.

Over 100,000 people were killed during the war in Bosnia, which ended with a U.S.-brokered agreement that divided the state into administrations based largely on ethnic lines between Bosniaks, Serbs, and Croats.