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Karadzic aide jailed for war crimes

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THE HAGUE (CNN) -- The U.N. war crimes tribunal has convicted former Bosnian Serb parliamentary speaker Momcilo Krajisnik of war crimes and sentenced him to 27 years in prison, but cleared him of genocide charges.

Krajisnik, 61, has been on trial since shortly after he was detained by NATO-led forces in April 2000.

He was convicted Wednesday of persecutions, extermination, murder, deportation and forced transfer of non-Serb civilians during the conflict in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the 1990s, according to a news release from the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague, Netherlands.

The court found Krajisnik helped former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic -- who is still at large -- and other officials to "ethnically recompose the territories targeted by the Bosnian-Serb leadership by drastically reducing the proportion of Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Croats through expulsion."

While the original method of expulsion included deportations and forced transfers, the court found that evidence showed "the criminal means of the enterprise very soon grew to include other crimes of persecution, as well as murder, and extermination."

"Krajisnik wanted the Muslim and Croat populations moved out of Bosnian-Serb territories in large numbers, and accepted that a heavy price of suffering, death, and destruction was necessary to achieve Serb domination and a viable statehood," the court judgment stated.

Nevertheless, the court found that the evidence did "not show that the crime of genocide formed part of the common objective of the joint criminal enterprise in which Mr. Krajisnik is shown on the evidence to have participated, nor that Mr. Krajisnik had the specific intent necessary for genocide."

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