Islamist Faces Retrial over Bosnia U.S. Embassy Attack

The retrial of an Islamist extremist who fired at the U.S. embassy in Sarajevo in 2011 opened here Monday after an appeals court had annulled his 18-year sentence.

Mevlid Jasarevic, a Muslim Serbian national, was again charged with "terrorism," prosecutor Dubravko Campara said.

The retrial of the 24-year-old was ordered in July by the appeals court that cited failures to respect Jasarevic's legal rights during the process.

The defendant's lawyer Senad Dupovac told the court that during the new trial he would try to prove that the "U.S. embassy, security and employees were not endangered" during the attack.

Jasarevic was given an 18-year sentence in December 2012, the heaviest ever handed down for terrorism offences by a Bosnian court.

He fired 105 bullets at the U.S. embassy in Sarajevo in October 2011 with an automatic weapon for almost an hour before being shot by police and arrested. One police officer was injured in the attack.

Jasarevic had joined a group of Islamists in Gornja Maoca, a hamlet in northeastern Bosnia considered the headquarters of the Bosnian Wahhabi movement, the ultra-conservative branch of Islam that dominates in Saudi Arabia. The group has been targeted in several police operations in the last few years.

During Bosnia's 1992-1995 ethnic war between Croats, Muslims and Serbs, a large number of volunteers from Muslim nations flocked to the Balkan country to take up arms.

Many of them stayed on after the war and obtained Bosnian citizenship.

Bosnia's Muslims, who make up 40 percent of the Balkan country's 3.8 million inhabitants, mostly practice a moderate form of the religion. According to security estimates there are 3,000 members of the Wahhabi movement.