Bosnian Serb sentenced to 17 years in jail for killing Muslims.

(From AP Online)

The U.N. war crimes tribunal on Wednesday convicted a former Bosnian Serb police commander for crimes against humanity and sentenced him to 17 years in prison for the 1992 murders of more than 200 Muslim men during the Bosnian war.

Darko Mrdja, 36, stood silently as Judge Alphonse Orie announced the verdict, nearly a year after Mrdja confessed to the crime in a plea bargain with U.N. prosecutors.

"The sentence should reflect all of the cruelty embodied in Darko Mrdja's participation in the killing and the shooting," Orie said. "We do not accept that Mrdja had no alternative but to participate in the massacre."

When the three-way war erupted in 1992 between Bosnia's main ethnic groups _ Muslims, Serbs and Croats _ Mrdja was a police commander in the northwestern Serb-dominated city of Prijedor, where hundreds of local Muslims were captured and held in prison camps.

In August of that year, police officers under Mrdja's command put a group of Muslim inmates onto two buses and told them they would be taken to a Muslim-held territory and exchanged for Serbs.

Instead, the victims were transported to a ...