CAT/C/35/D/174/2000
Page 6
“fix him”; (f) officials of the Belgrade Central Prison, to elucidate whether N. N. had
escaped from prison, but was subsequently released on probation by decision of 23
July 1993 of the deputy public prosecutor; and (g) A. N., the sister of N. N., to ask her
whether an intervention team of the Belgrade Secretariat for Internal Affairs came to
her flat in January 1994, threatening that they would throw N. N. from the sixth floor,
should they capture him.
2.14 In a report dated 27 November 1996, the same medical experts who prepared
the autopsy report and the first forensic expertise dated 22 November 1994, while
dismissing the questions asked by the complainants’ lawyer (para. 2.12) as too vague,
addressed the objections raised by Dr. Z. S. (para. 2.11), observing (a) that it was not
customary to state the time and place of death in an autopsy report, as this information
was already contained in the report of the doctor establishing the death and in the
police report; (b) that the reason for the late autopsy was that the blood of the
deceased (presumably a drug addict) was tested for HIV and that the results were
received late on Friday, 22 April 1994, so that the autopsy could not be carried out
before Monday, 25 April; (c) that the corpse had been kept in a refrigerator and only
started to decompose during the autopsy and its subsequent cleaning and transport to
the hospital chapel; (d) that the purpose of the autopsy report was to record the
injuries and changes of the body of the deceased, rather than to explain how the brain
tissue came on his sweatshirt; it could have passed through his nose or mouth, as the
front skull cavity, which forms the roof of the nose cavity and of the pharynx,
displayed numerous fractures of the skull base bones, which were always
accompanied by ruptures of the attached hard brain tissue; (e) that the little amount of
blood found in the chest cavity of the deceased was not due to death prior to the fall
but to the consid erable blood loss resulting from his injuries; (f) that Dr. Z. S. himself
did not rule out that a fall on the feet could cause transversal fractures of the leg
bones; (g) that the bending of the body following the contact of the feet with the
ground did not exclude that numerous injuries, such as the aorta rupture, led to
hyperextension of the body; (h) that the mechanism of the fall first on the feet and, in
a second phase, on the left side of the body and the head explained the decollement in
the region of the left thigh, the fissure on the lower left forehead, the fracture of the
skull bones, and the brain contusions; and (i) that the fall on the feet reduced the
body’s impact on the ground, which explained why the autopsy report recorded
neither protrusion of the thigh bone heads through pelvic bones, nor circular fractures
of the skull base.
2.15 On 26 February and 18 June 1997, the complainants’ lawyer requested the
district public prosecutor to resubmit his questions (para. 2.12) to the commission of
forensic experts to seek clarification of the contradictions between the experts’
findings and the findings of Dr. Z. S.
2.16 On 21 August 1997, Dr. Z. S. commented on the experts’ second forensic
report (para. 2.14), criticizing (a) that the experts had not provided a satisfactory
explanation as to why the result of the HIV test had not been included in the autopsy
report; (b) the contradiction between the experts’ finding that the brain tissue on the
deceased’s clothes came through his nose and mouth and the statement in the autopsy
report that the mucous membrane of the lips and mouth cavity were “examined in
detail” but that “no signs of injuries [were] observed”, and that no “foreign content”,
i.e. traces of brain tissue, was found in the nose and mout h; (c) the experts’ failure to