SARAJEVO, April 30 (Reuters) - Bosnia's war crimes court jailed a Bosnian Muslim ex-police commander on Wednesday for 11 years for torturing Croat prisoners and civilians in a church in southern Bosnia during the Muslim-Croat war in 1993-94. The 41-year-old Zijad Kurtovic was found guilty on each of 11 counts of the indictment which charged him with war crimes against civilians and prisoners of war and violation of the laws and practices of warfare, the court said in a statement.

"Kurtovic...was found guilty because on several occasions during October 1993, he physically and mentally tortured detained Croat civilians and prisoners of war in the Roman Catholic Church of All Saints in Donja Dreznica," it said.

Bosnian Muslims and Croats entered the 1992-95 war as allies against Bosnian Serbs but then fought their own war in 1993-94, which was ended by a Washington-brokered peace agreement.

Kurtovic beat the detainees with iron bats, crosses and statues of Saints, according to the indictment. He also ordered his subordinates to use detainees as a human shield between the Bosnian Muslim-led army and the Croatian Defence Council (HVO).

"The accused ... forced detainees to eat pages from the Bible and other religious books," the indictment said.

"On the unknown day in October 1993, the accused and Hasan Delic forced two detained HVO soldiers to perform oral sex," the indictment said. The two men then allegedly beat one Croat detainee and extinguished cigarette butts on his neck, it added.

The members of the Bosnian army 4th Corps, which operated in the southern Herzegovina region, were reported to have committed cruel acts against Croat civilians from the Dreznica area but few of them have been prosecuted so far.

Bosnia's war crimes court was set up in 2005 to take up some of the workload of the United Nations war crimes tribunal and take over low- and mid-level cases as the Hague court plans to wind down by 2010. (Reporting by Maja Zuvela; Editing by Dominic Evans)

AlertNet news is provided by