The Pose of The Death Mannequins

On the first one, a man dressed in a police uniform holds an automatic pistol at the back of another man wearing civilian clothes. On the next photograph, the civilian looks as if he has been hit. In the bottom left corner of the first photograph a man lying on the ground with an arm bent over his eyes can be seen. He is covered with blood. The accompanying text says the photographs were taken last Thursday in Brcko (B&H) and that they show the execution of Moslems accused of firing at a column of Serbian refugees.

The experts to whom VREME has turned for an opinion, say that the uniformed man is holding a "Scorpion" automatic pistol with silencer, of Yugoslav origin.

The BORBA daily took the photographs from a Spanish paper and published them last Monday, thus, we were told, adding fuel to the discontent of the military and Serbian authorities' already steaming with the daily.

On Sunday, the state owned Serbian TV brought a man before the audience, and announced him as Dragan Veselic, head of the Brcko police. He said: "This simply couldn't have happened here, having in mind the extent of security measures, and as far as I know, it is not true." Then the owner of a Brcko private TV station Vasif Sulejmanovic was shown, who said: "I guarantee that I haven't seen or heard of such a thing." Two days later, the government news agency TANJUG included in its domestic service an item which, citing the state TV's report, said that "the REUTERS news on the killing of Moslems in Brcko has been denied". A day before, the same news was transmitted in English, in the foreign service. The Belgrade POLITIKA daily and other press have published the whole TANJUG report.

Attempts by the Yugoslav press to obtain the controversial photographs for expert evaluation were in vain. REUTERS had transmitted the news in the tele-photo network with a note that said: "Yugoslavia out", which means that the local subscribers did not get it. As VREME has learned, the REUTERS center in London acted in that way in order to protect their photographers of Yugoslav nationality.

Out of a series of some 10 photographs, REUTERS published only two of the least bloody photographs. One of these, obviously taken after the two published photos, shows the face of the policemen is circling the civilian now lying on the pavement. There is also a shot showing a man in cammo uniform, holding a machine gun, with a cigarette in his mouth, and aiming at a young man, lying terrified on the ground, and another showing some ten corpses, covered with still red blood, thrown one on top of another on the bank of some larger water surface. War reporters and photographers to whom VREME has talked are unanimous in one thing: the pictures were taken with the consent of the policeman holding the weapon in his hand and of the man with the pointed machine gun. If it were otherwise, the film at least, if not the photographers, would never have left the site where the pictures were taken.