Four Serb paramilitaries have been found guilty of murdering civilians during the Srebrenica massacre, in the first trial relating to the atrocity in Serbia in 1995.

Five former members of the “Scorpions” paramilitary unit of the Serb army were the first people to be charged in Serbia for their part in the killing of 8,000 Muslim men and boys during the Srebrenica massacre when they were arrested nearly two years ago. Today four of them were convicted of war crimes while a fifth was acquitted.

"The defendants are guilty... of killing six prisoners of Muslim origin,” Judge Gordana Bozilovic Petrovic told the packed courtroom of Serbia’s special war crimes court in Belgrade this morning, describing the murders as a war crime against unarmed civilians.

The soldiers were arrested in June 2005 after footage of them killing six Muslims ten years earlier was shown at the war crimes trial of Slobodan Milosevic, the former Serbian leader who died in UN detention in the Hague before his case was concluded.

The amateur footage, which was re-broadcast countless times on television, has been credited with shaking the widely-held conviction in Serbia that the Srebrenica massacre had not taken place. It is considered the worst act of European genocide since the Second World War.

The pictures showed the Scorpions, commanded by Slobodan Medic, one of the defendants convicted today, leading six young men, two of them in their teens, from a lorry and into a forest near the town of Trnovo.

The camouflaged soldiers were seen smoking and joking, mocking the prisoners before shooting four in the head in a clearing. The two remaining young men were ordered to carry the bodies into a barn, where they too were shot. The video was filmed by a member of the unit and smuggled out of the Scorpions' archives to a Serbian human rights activist.

Today Medic, whose nickname during the war was "Boca", was found guilty of murder and sentenced to 20 years imprisonment with his chief aide, Branislav Medic. The prosecution had asked for 40-year sentences, the maximum under Serbian law.

Pera Petrasevic, the third soldier accused of murder but the only defendant to admit the charges, was sentenced to 13 years, while Aleksandar Medic, found guilty of being an accomplice to the killings, was given a five-year sentence. The fifth defendant, Aleksandar Vukov, was acquitted.

With the exception of Petrasevic, all the defendants steadfastly denied the charges. During the trial, Medic, who led the Scorpions, a former security company that reported to the Serbian Interior Ministry during the 1992-1995 war, admitted that his unit was in Trnovo in July 1995 but said they did not take part in the massacre.

He also testified that the first he had seen of the footage was when it was shown on Serbian television in 2005 and that if he had caught a member of his unit filming it, he would have shot them "like a rabbit".

Twenty-one witnesses were called during the war crimes trial, which attracted a devoted and partisan following. Dozens of relatives of the victims, whose bodies were exhumed in 1999, attended the proceedings along with crowds of crewcut and tattooed Serbian nationalists, who regard the Scorpions unit as patriots.

The paramilitaries become the first men to be convicted in Serbia for their role in the Srebrenica massacre. Nineteen officials have been charged by the UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague for directing the atrocity, of whom six have been convicted. Serbia was cleared, as a nation, of genocide for its activities during the Bosnia by the UN's International Court of Justice in February.

General Ratko Mladic, the Serb commander thought to have had overall responsibility for the massacre, which took place after Dutch peacekeepers handed over control of a UN-protected enclave to Bosnian soldiers in July 1995, has never been caught. His ability to evade capture in Serbia, where he is believed to be hiding with the assistance of nationalist sympathisers, has proved a significant obstacle to Serbia's attempts to join the EU.

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