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| - Two former Serbian spy chiefs in Slobodan Milosevic's regime were convicted Wednesday of crimes against humanity and war crimes in the 1990s Balkans wars after a retrial by a UN court. Jovica Stanisic, 70, the former head of Serbia's state security service, and his deputy Franko Simatovic, 71, were each sentenced to 12 years in jail, the court in The Hague said in a statement. Judge Burton Hall said the court "finds Jovica Stanisic and Franko Simatovic guilty" of backing Serb forces that carried out crimes during the takeover of the Bosnian town of Bosanski Samac in April 1992. The pair helped train and deploy Serb forces and local Serbs "which had a substantial effect on the commission of the crimes", the court said. But judges said there was not sufficient evidence to back claims by prosecutors that they could be held responsible for a wider "campaign of terror" by Serb death squads across Bosnia and Croatia. Stanisic and Simatovic were initially acquitted in 2013, by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague, but after an outcry judges in 2015 ordered a retrial. The case is one of the last left over from the wars that tore apart Yugoslavia after the fall of communism, after former Bosnian Serb military chief Ratko Mladic had his life sentence for genocide upheld earlier in June. The Balkans wars left some 130,000 people dead and millions displaced. UN prosecutors said Stanisic and Simatovic were part of a joint criminal enterprise that included the late Serbian president Milosevic, who died in The Hague in 2006, and Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, also serving a life sentence. dk/tgb
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