By ARTHUR MAX
The Associated Press
Friday, June 30, 2006; 3:23 PM

AMSTERDAM, Netherlands -- A former police officer who commanded troops defending the Bosnian Muslim enclave of Srebrenica was handed a lenient two-year sentence Friday for failing to prevent murder and torture of Serb captives.

The U.N. war crimes tribunal, which imposed the sentence, ordered Naser Oric's immediate release since he has been in jail for more than three years.

Oric, 39, was acquitted of direct involvement in the murder of prisoners in the early years of the 1992-95 Bosnia war. But the court found he had closed his eyes to their mistreatment and failed to punish their killers.

The three judges of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia acquitted him of all charges related to the wanton destruction of Serb villages.

The trial was closely watched in the Balkans. Muslims, who hail Oric as a war hero for his three-year defense of the enclave against Serb forces, had anticipated exoneration.

Serbs had hoped a conviction would counterbalance earlier judgments that found Bosnian Serbs guilty of genocide at Srebrenica. More than 8,000 Muslims were slaughtered there in one week in July 1995, Europe's worst civilian massacre since the Holocaust.

Prosecutors had sought an 18-year prison term. Defense lawyers said any punishment would be inappropriate.

The judges found that during two periods in 1992 and 1993, Oric's troops battered Serb prisoners with wooden planks, iron rods and baseball bats, and pulled the teeth of some of them with rusty pliers. At least six prisoners died in custody.

Oric should have known the prisoners were at risk and taken steps to prevent their mistreatment, the judgment said. But the judges said they unanimously decided on leniency because of the untenable situation in the besieged town.

Oric, then 25, was responsible for a population swelled by refugees, without food, and in charge of ill-equipped and poorly trained forces. He had no military or administrative experience, his authority was scorned by other Muslim leaders and he had no communications with his superiors outside the area, the judges found.

"It was a continuous uphill struggle that, in actual fact, achieved very few results," the verdict said.

Bosnian Serbs denounced the sentence as "a farce," while some Muslims survivors of Srebrenica were disappointed he was found guilty of anything.

"Two years may appear to be a mild sentence, but I think even a minute is not fair," said defense witness Sabra Kolenovic.

In Belgrade, Serbia's President Boris Tadic called the sentence "scandalous."

"People who steal at supermarkets are given two-year prison sentences," Tadic said.

Slavko Jovicic, the deputy head of the Association of Serb War Prisoners, said his group was severing all cooperation with the chief prosecutor in The Hague to protest the sentence.

"We have handed over to Carla del Ponte evidence in the Oric case about the burning of villages and the murder of 3,000 civilians. She only charged him with the murder of six people," he said in Sarajevo.

Throughout Bosnia, an estimated 250,000 people were killed in the war between Muslims, Catholic Croats and Orthodox Serbs. About 16,500 bodies have been exhumed from more than 300 mass graves.

At the outbreak of the Bosnian war, Oric organized a militia to defend Srebrenica, and was later elected commander of the Muslim territorial defense. Oric's troops swept through Serb-occupied towns in 1992 to get weapons and food for the enclave's starving inhabitants. The fighters were followed by hordes of civilians who joined in the looting and burning, the judgment said.

Oric was replaced as Srebrenica commander just a few weeks before the Serbs overran the enclave, which by then was a U.N. safe zone supposedly protected by Dutch forces. But some Serbs blamed the misdeeds of his troops years earlier for provoking the slaughter.