Karl Stagno-Navarra
The defence counsel to former Bosnian-Serb President Radovan Karadzic, currently held in detention at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), is expected to be requesting the Maltese government to supply him with all information relating to Italian national Ciro del Negro, declared as a ‘persona non grata’ in March 1995.
Del Negro – who was once married to a Maltese woman and worked as a seaman on board the Malta-Sicily catamaran – was expelled from Malta by order of the Commissioner of Police after a series of European-wide investigations had revealed his involvement in gun-running with the Balkan states during the war in Bosnia.
Radovan Karadzic’s demands are a follow-up to the official reply deposited this week by the Maltese government to the ICTY in the Hague, who denied having any information about shipments or sales of arms, ammunition or military equipment to the Bosnian Muslims during the period April 1992-August 1995.
In its Note Verbale submitted to the ICTY by ambassador Ivan Fsadni, the Maltese government insisted that “during the same period there were no individual UNPROFOR (United Nations Protection Force) members from the Armed Forces of Malta and the government of Malta holds no information suggesting that any shipment or sales as referred to in Karadzic’s letter of June 2, 2009 were made by persons fitting the description of individual UNPROFOR members from Malta.”
The official Maltese reply came just days before the ICTY had to decide on Radovan Karadzic’s request to have a binding order issued against Malta, given that he was left without an official reply to his three letters delivered by hand to the Maltese embassy in The Hague during the past weeks.
The former Bosnian-Serb leader is currently preparing for his defence strategy for his impending trial before the ICTY and is requesting Malta and Italy to provide all the information they may have about the weapons that were supplied to the Bosnian Muslim Army (ABiH) who rivalled his troops in the bloody war that left thousands displaced or brutally killed and displaced.
His new requests about Ciro del Negro are expected to open a Pandora’s box, as details about gun running and other classified information on telephone conversations made from Malta by the Italian to known arms dealers around Europe, were destined to the war-torn region at the time.
The transcripts are reportedly contained in a classified file in the hands of the Maltese and the Italian security services, and parts of it were leaked to the press in 1997.
When a request was made to Prime Minister Alfred Sant in 1997 for the file to be seen by the media, an official reply by the then government was that due to the classified information contained and supplied by foreign security services, the file was not accessible.
The Office of the Prime Minister had quoted the advice of the Attorney General.
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