A Serb officer jailed for the 1991 massacre of people seeking refuge at a Croatian hospital has had his sentence more than tripled to 17 years by a UN war crimes appeal court.
Veselin Sljivancanin, who had been provisionally released in December 2007 after spending four years in custody, had returned to the court in the Netherlands for the judgement on Tuesday.
The prosecution alleged that the former Yugoslav Peoples Army (JNA) laid siege to the city of Vukovar from August to November 1991, when it fell to Serb forces.
Several hundred people sought refuge at the Vukovar hospital in the last days of the siege in the hopes that it would be evacuated in the presence of international observers. But the indictment said that about 400 non-Serbs were removed by the JNA from the hospital, loaded onto buses and taken to JNA barracks and later to a farm in nearby Ovcara where they were beaten.
A court document said: "Soldiers then transported their non-Serb captives in groups of about 10 to 20 to a ravine ... where they killed at least 264 Croats and other non-Serbs."After the killings, the bodies of the victims were buried by bulldozer in a mass grave at the same location."
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