Bosnia court indicts Croat ex-soldier for war crimes

SARAJEVO, April 14 (Reuters) - The Bosnian war crimes court indicted a Croat former soldier on Thursday over the killings of dozens of Bosnian Muslim civilians in central Bosnia during fighting in 1993-94 between Muslim and Croat Bosnians.

Miroslav Anic is accused of taking part in a series of attacks by a Croat militia on Bosnian Muslim villages from June to October 1993, the court said in a statement.

Bosnia's Muslims and Croats were allies at the start of the 1992-95 Bosnia war when both opposed Bosnian Serb forces, but fought each other briefly when Croat forces tried to create a separate Croat statelet in Bosnia.

The Bosnia war, Europe's worst conflict since World War Two, led to 100,000 deaths and the country remains divided between two autonomous regions, the Muslim-Croat federation and the Serb Republic, bound together by a weak central government.

The court statement said Anic was accused of being part of a Croat unit that attacked the village of Grahovci in June 1993 and killed eight male villagers.

He also took part in an attack on the village of Han Ploca, in which his unit killed about 20 civilians, the statement said.

In October 1993, he is accused of taking part in an attack on the village Stupni Do near the central town of Vares during which his and other units killed 38 Bosnian Muslim villagers, it added.

The Bosnian war crimes court was opened in 2005 to prosecute war crimes cases related to the Bosnian war, and to ease the burden on the Hague-based International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY).

Bosnia's Serbs and Croats see the court as a political institution biased against them. The Serb Republic parliament approved on Wednesday a referendum challenging the legitimacy of the state court and prosecution. (Reporting by Daria Sito-Sucic; editing by Tim Pearce)