SEATTLE — Family man. Soccer fan. Respected community member.
A defense attorney used those words Wednesday to describe an Everett man facing extradition to his native Bosnia-Herzegovina on war-crimes charges.
Edin Dzeko, 39, h
as been in federal detention since his arrest April 13 by U.S. marshals acting on an extradition request. Getting out on bail is a long shot as he awaits an extradition hearing.
Dzeko’s wife wiped away tears Wednesday as her husband sat in a federal courtroom for his second court appearance. She was one of about 30 relatives and friends there to support Dzeko. He gazed in their direction and offered a sad smile.
“Thanks a lot for coming. It means a lot for Edin,” defense attorney David Gehrke told supporters after the hearing. “I’ve only known him for a short time. He’s a wonderful man.”
Wednesday’s pre-extradition hearing was continued to June 8. An extradition hearing could be scheduled later. Special Assistant U.S. Attorney Marci Ellsworth raised no objection to giving Gehrke more time to prepare for the complicated legal process.
The government of Bosnia and Herzegovina wants to try Dzeko for the 1993 killing of civilians and captured soldiers in the village of Trusina. The massacre was part of the ethnic violence that overtook the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s.
Outside the courtroom, Gehrke described Dzeko as a man respected by fellow Bosnian immigrants in the Puget Sound area, for whom he hosted lamb feasts at his home in Everett’s Pinehurst area.
Gehrke has said his client is innocent of the charges, though that’s a matter to be decided in Bosnian courts, not in the U.S. Dzeko also has a Bosnian attorney. Gehrke said he might consider speeding up the extradition process so his client can return to Bosnia for trial and get on with his life.
Others have been tried in connection with the same village killings, the attorney added, with some convicted and others acquitted.
At the time of his arrest, Dzeko worked for a company that U.S. Navy contracts with for groundskeeping and janitorial services, said Kristin Ching, a local Navy public affairs officer.
His two teenage children live at the family’s Everett home, Gehrke said. He’s a soccer fan who holds season tickets for the Seattle Sounders FC. He shares the same name with Edin Dzeko, a player with the British Premier League soccer club Manchester City*, who Gehrke has been told is his client’s distant cousin.
Dzeko immigrated to the U.S. in 2001 and became a naturalized citizen in 2006. Though not a Lutheran, he was sponsored by a Lutheran church, Gehrke said.
Court papers accuse Dzeko of war crimes in April 1993 when he was 21. The charges include helping lead an attack on the village of Trusina that ended in 16 deaths and serious injuries for four people, including two infants.
The events were part of the 1992-1995 war in Bosnia-Herzegovina that killed at least 100,000 people. Conflicts during that time pitted Eastern Orthodox Christian Serbs, Roman Catholic Croats and predominantly Muslim Bosnians against one another.
Bosnian Muslims generally fared the worst of the major ethnic groups. The biggest act of genocide during the war occurred in 1995, when an estimated 8,000 Muslim men and boys were executed by Serb forces and paramilitaries in the town of Srebrenica.
The conflict in Trusina, however, involved attacks by the predominantly Muslim Bosnia and Herzegovina army against Croat civilians and militia members. At other points in the war, Bosnian Muslims and Croats fought together against Serb forces.
The extradition request says Dzeko helped command the Zulfikar Special Purposes Detachment, which Bosnian prosecutors say targeted Croat civilians and soldiers from the Croatian Defense Council, an ethnic Croatian militia.
Prosecutors accuse Dzeko of forcing an injured man out of a house at gunpoint before another member of his unit shot and killed him. Dzeko also is accused of throwing another man into the yard of a house and shooting him dead. When the dead man’s wife would not stop grieving, Dzeko allegedly shot her dead as well. The extradition request says Dzeko also was a member of an execution squad.
Gehrke acknowledges that Dzeko was a member of the Bosnian Army, but said he was at a hospital with a mortally wounded commander at the time of the killings. He contends that his client is not the same man identified in extradition paperwork.
On the same day of Dzeko’s arrest in Everett, U.S. marshals in Oregon arrested a woman in connection with some of the same events.
Rasema Handanovic, also known as Zolja and Sammy Rasema Yetisen, is accused of shooting a civilian woman and an elderly couple to death. Additionally, the Beaverton, Ore., woman is accused of taking part in a firing-squad execution of unarmed soldiers and civilians.
Handanovic became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 2002.
If convicted, both suspects face a minimum of 10 years in prison.
Extradition paperwork includes hundreds pages with harrowing eyewitness accounts.
“What happened in Trusina and what I did has been haunting me for 15 years now and has not allowed me to live a normal life,” one witness told a Bosnian prosecutor. “Having said this I feel relived, no matter what will happen to me.”
Noah Haglund: 425-339-3465; nhaglund@heraldnet.com.
Correction, April 28, 2011: The soccer player’s club was misidentified in an earlier version of this story.
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