The defence team for Croatian General Ante Gotovina, sentenced by the ICTY trial chamber to 24 years in prison, has asked the appeals chamber of the UN tribunal in The Hague to allow the introduction of new evidence which his lawyers believe challenges a conclusion of the trial chamber's judgement that local Serbs fled central and southern Croatia due to excessive shelling of Knin by the Croatian Army during the liberating operation "Storm" in August 1995 when the Croatian forces retook those areas from Serb insurgents, the tribunal reported on Wednesday.
Those are documents that were not available to the defence teams during the trial, as the prosecution of the UN-run International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) failed to disclose them in timely manner.
Gotovina's lawyers also believe that those five documents "could have impacted the Trial Chamber's verdict."
The lawyers say that the new evidence show that Serb civilians were evacuated on the order of local Serb rebel authorities who prepared a plan for evacuation and even asked the United Nations personnel "to facilitate the evacuation of 32,000 civilians".
The contents of another four documents have not been disclosed as they are marked as classified documents.
The defence also proposes the addition of a statement by British artillery expert Timothy Granville-Chapman who also contests the trial chamber's conclusion about excessive and indiscriminate shelling by the Croatian forces.
