The leader of the ultra-nationalist Radical Party of Serbia (SRS) and the convicted war criminal Vojislav Seselj said on Tuesday the policemen on trial for the killing of 317 prisoners in the village of Kravica near Srebrenica in eastern Bosnia was “innocent” since it was an incident, not a war crime, the Beta news agency reported.

His party members gathered outside the Special Court in Belgrade in a protest against the trial of eight police officers, former members for the Special Brigade of the Republika Srpska (Serb-dominated entity in Bosnia) Interior Ministry, for the crime in the village in 1995.

Seselj said the policemen were on trial for “a fictional” war crime and that there was no genocide.

Two international courts ruled the execution of over 8,000 men from Srebrenica was genocide.

“We are here to confront a framed case, to fight for the truth and defend the innocent. All eight policemen are innocent, and the evidence proves that” Seselj said.

He said that 20 policemen murdered 317 Muslim prisoners of war who “rebelled” after one grabbed a policeman’s rifle and killed him. Seselj added there were 317 POWs, and not 1,313 as some “fabricate.”

The charges say the eight, together with other unknown members of the Special Brigade, took part in killing several hundreds of Bosniaks in the Agriculture Cooperative and around in Kravica in July 1995.

Also in July 1995, in the nearby town of Srebrenica, Bosnian Serb soldiers separated women and children from men and young boys and killed over 8,000 of them at different locations.

So far, forensics have identified and return the families the remains of over 6,000 massacred Bosniaks.

Seselj was sentenced to 10 years in jail by the UN International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals for the expulsion of local Croats from the northern village of Hrtkovci in Serbia but was released since he spent almost 12 years in The Hague custody.