The head of the Bosnian Muslim forces during the Balkan wars of the 1990s was sentenced by a U.N. court to three years' imprisonment on the charge that his troops meted out cruel treatment to Bosnian Serb soldiers captured during the conflict.
The International Criminal Tribunal for the former guilty of failing to take necessary and reasonable measures to prevent and punish the cruel treatment meted out by the El Mujahed Detachment of the Army of the Republic of Bosnia and
Herzegovina.
The charge focused on crimes committed in Livade village and Kamenica camp in central Bosnia in July-August 1995, when 12 Bosnian Serb soldiers were subjected to torture, including severe beatings and electric shocks, by detachment members.
The I.C.T.Y. trial chamber, however, acquitted Delic of three counts of murder and cruel treatment, relating to three separate incidents involving the detachment - which comprised foreign Muslim fighters - between 1993 and 1995.
The detachment came into existence in August 1993 as the result of an order from Delic.
The charges on which he was acquitted include killing of 24 Bosnian Croat civilians and soldiers by Mujahedin troops in the central Bosnian villages of Maline and Bikosi. The I.C.T.Y. found that no superior-subordinate relationships existed between Delic and the troops at that time.