A court in Bosnia has convicted seven Serbs of genocide for rounding up and executing more than 1,000 Bosnian Muslims in a single day during the Srebrenica massacre.

The Sarajevo court gave the men sentences ranging from 38 to 42 years for their participation in the murders — some of the 8,000 killings in the 1995 massacre for which Radovan Karadzic must answer in The Hague. Four other defendants were acquitted.

The civilians had been rounded up and kept in a warehouse before being slaughtered, the court was told. Those convicted include Milos Stupar, the commander of the Second Special Police Squad. One of the defendants was in the army of Republika Srpska, a Bosnian Serb entity created by Dr Karadzic, its first president. The court was told how Ratko Mladic, Dr Karadzic’s military general and the last high-profile war crimes suspect still at large, told the prisoners that nothing would happen to them. But after his departure armed men in civilian clothes escorted the prisoners to a farm hangar in a nearby village.

A witness named only as S1, who survived by hiding under a pile of bodies, told the court: “The hangar was totally full. Then we heard shooting. I closed my eyes waiting for them to kill me. All the men fell to the ground. I lay down as well. There was blood everywhere. While I was lying on the floor, I heard screams and people cried for help in panic.”

According to S1, the soldiers threw grenades at the dead prisoners after the shooting, which lasted for about an hour. He managed to escape after spending 24 hours among the bloodied corpses, together with another survivor, witness S2.

Witness S2 said: “It was a living hell. There were screams, cries for help. They were shooting for a while, and then took a break to go out and have a cigarette. Then they returned and started singling out and shooting the surviving prisoners.”

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