One of the five Serb paramilitaries charged with the videotaped murders of six Bosnian Muslims said today that he would have killed the soldier who filmed it "like a rabbit" if he had known it would become public.

The five suspects were charged after the gruesome 1995 video was shown in public in June.

The video footage at the heart of the trial shows six young Bosnians being taken from a truck on a summer's day, their hands tied behind their backs. The men are lined up on a hillside. Four are shot dead from behind, while the others are ordered to carry the bodies into a nearby barn, where they are killed in a hail of machine gun bullets.

The broadcast led to the arrest of the five men allegedly shown in the tape - Slobodan Medic, Pero Petrasevic, Aleksandar Medic, Branislav Medic and Aleksandar Vukov. The men were charged in October and face up to 40 years in jail if found guilty at their trial in Belgrade, which opened today. Serbia has abolished the death penalty.

As many as 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were killed when Bosnian Serb troops overran the enclave of Srebrenica in 1995. It was Europe’s worst mass killing since World War II. The video is thought to have been filmed near the town of Trnovo, outside Srebrenica, in July 1995.

Screened from the packed courtroom by bulletproof glass, none of the defendants entered a plea, because this is not part of Serbian judicial procedure. Instead, the judge immediately began questioning the indictees, starting with the main defendant, Slobodan Medic.

Medic, the commander of the dreaded "Scorpions" paramilitary unit, showed no remorse for the slayings during his opening remarks, saying that if he had known that the footage would become public, he would have "killed like a rabbit" the Serb soldier who did the filming.

He said that he did not order the executions of civilians, but added that he could not control some of his Serb soldiers who were eager to kill rival Muslims after losing family members allegedly brutally slain by Bosnian Muslim fighters.

"I think I did everything the best I could, considering the circumstances," Medic said. "The footage is now at the center of attention but back then it was irrelevant. Now it can cost me my freedom."

The footage, first shown at the UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague, Netherlands, showed four Bosnian Muslim men being shot dead from behind. The two others were ordered to carry the bodies into a nearby barn where they, too, were killed.

"There is no death sentence, but I hope justice will be served for those monsters," said Sajma Saltic, whose brother Sadik, 36, was among the six dead men.

The footage, which caused public outrage in Bosnia as well as in Serbia, was first shown at the trial of Slobodan Milosevic, the former Yugoslav President who was indicted on charges of genocide for the killings allegedly committed by Serb troops during the Bosnian and other Balkan wars.

The powerful images on the video were seen by some legal experts as the strongest evidence yet linking Milosevic to the Srebrenica killings.

The Hague tribunal last week refused to allow UN war crimes prosecutors to call the six members of the killing squad seen in the video, including one who is awaiting trial in Croatia. The tribunal said that the footage was not considered important enough to reopen the prosecution case against Milosevic.

The indictment read out at the Belgrade court said that the Scorpions unit numbered about 500 men, and that it fought on three occasions in neighbouring Bosnia during the 1992-95 war. But it also said the unit was under the command of Bosnian Serbs, and not Belgrade during, the war.

"This is a trial of great importance for our judiciary because we want to prove that we can handle the most serious cases stemming from the (Balkan) wars," said Bruno Vekaric, spokesman for Serbian war crimes prosecutors.

This is the first case to address the Srebrenica massacre in a Serbian court.

Within days of its appearance in the Hague, the video was broadcast on Serbian television, causing shock among those who had maintained that the horror of the Srebrenica massacre, the worst mass killing in Europe since the Second World War, had been exaggerated by victims and foreign governments. The atrocity took place after Serbian forces overran a lightly guarded UN camp for Bosnian Muslims.

Radovan Karadzic, the leader of Bosnia and the commander of the Bosnian Serb forces, and Ratko Mladic, a Bosnian Serb military commander, are the two men believed to have directed the Srebrenica massacre. Both remain at large.