Two Bosnian Muslim Commanders Convicted of War Crimes

AMSTERDAM, March 15 -- Two Bosnian Muslim army commanders were convicted of war crimes Wednesday for failing to rein in foreign Muslim volunteers who murdered and tortured Bosnian Croats and Serbs in the 1990s.

The U.N. war crimes tribunal in The Hague sentenced former Bosnian army chief of staff Enver Hadzihasanovic to five years in prison and his deputy, Amir Kubura, to 2 1/2 years.

It was the first time the tribunal had dealt with the mujaheddin, or holy warriors, who came mainly from North Africa and the Middle East to fight on the Muslim side in the 1992-95 Bosnian war, in which an estimated 200,000 people were killed.

Hundreds of volunteers, many of them veterans of the war in Afghanistan against Soviet occupation, enlisted in the Muslim cause in mid-1992 after Bosnia declared independence from the crumbling Yugoslav federation.

Yugoslavia was then headed by Slobodan Milosevic, who died in his cell near The Hague on Saturday in the custody of the same tribunal that tried the two Bosnians.

The two were among the highest-ranking Muslim officers brought to trial by the war crimes court, which has been criticized in Serbia for prosecuting far more Serbs than members of other ethnic groups.

Hadzihasanovic, 55, and Kubura, 42, were acquitted of the most serious allegation -- the massacre of non-Muslim Bosnians. Prosecutors had charged Hadzihasanovic with the responsibility for about 200 deaths and asked for a prison term of 20 years.

In northern Bosnia, meanwhile, NATO troops searched the home and business of a man suspected of helping Radovan Karadzic, the indicted Bosnian Serb wartime leader, evade capture. Charges against Karadzic include orchestrating the slaughter of 8,000 Muslims in Srebrenica in 1995.