Stjepanovic was first indicted for war crimes by a court in Bosnia in 2009, two years after Bosnian authorities issued a warrant for his arrest. The Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina charged him with the capture, abuse and murder of civilians in Bratunac.
It was only nine years later, however, that Bosnia managed to serve him with a new indictment, this time for sexual violence, while he was living in the Serbian town of Ljubovija, just over the border from Bratunac.
The two indictments were then merged and the case transferred to Serbia; Stjepanovic’s trial began in January 2021 at the Higher Court in Belgrade.
In December 2024, in a first instance ruling, Stjepanovic was found guilty and sentenced to 10 years in prison.
The court found that, as a member of the Bosnian Serb army, Stjepanovic participated in capturing 14 Bosniak civilians in the village of Borkovac, near Bratunac, in May 1992, during a wave of brutal ethnic cleansing of non-Serbs in eastern Bosnia. The civilians were assaulted, robbed and forced to a nearby stream, where eight were killed. The court also found that Stjepanovic raped a 19-year-old Bosniak woman early the following month.
The Belgrade Court of Appeal confirmed the verdict in June this year but increased his sentence to 13 years.
Stjepanovic, however, was long gone. The last record of him appearing in court was on December 24 last year, when the first instance verdict was pronounced.
In a meantime, prosecutors in Bosnia opened a new investigation into Stjepanovic concerning the murder of six civilians in Bratunac during the war. The case was sent to Serbia, but prosecutors in Belgrade sent it back, saying certain documents were missing.
“After reviewing the files in the case, it was sent yet again to the Serbian judiciary on October 16, 2025, with the note that the allegedly missing documentation was already contained in the case file that had previously been handed over,” the Prosecutor’s Office of Bosnia and Herzegovina told BIRN.
