BELGRADE, Serbia-Montenegro (AP) – The main suspect in a landmark trial of five Serb militiamen charged with the videotaped execution of six Bosnian Muslims said yesterday he would have killed the soldier who filmed it if he knew it would become public.

The suspects at the trial which opened yesterday were charged after the June airing of the gruesome 1995 video showing six civilians being taken from a truck, hands tied, lined up on a hillside near Srebrenica and sprayed with machine gun fire.

The five face up to 40 years in jail if found guilty. Serbia has abolished the death penalty.

None of the defendants entered a plea because it is not envisaged by the Serbian judicial procedure. Instead, the judge immediately began questioning the indictees, starting with main defendant Slobodan Medic.

Medic, the commander of the dreaded Serb “Scorpions” paramilitary unit, showed no remorse for the slayings during his opening remarks, saying that if he had known that the footage would become public, he would have “killed like a rabbit” the Serb soldier who did the filming.

As many as 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were killed when Bosnian Serb troops overran Srebrenica in 1995. It was Europe’s worst mass killing since World War II.

Medic insisted he did not order the executions of civilians, but added he could not control some of his soldiers who were eager to kill rival Muslims after losing family members allegedly brutally slain by Bosnian Muslim fighters.

The footage, first shown in June at the UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague, Netherlands, showed four Bosnian Muslim men being shot dead from behind. The two others were ordered to carry the bodies into a nearby barn where they, too, were killed.

The footage, which caused public outrage in Bosnia, as well as in Serbia, was first shown at the UN tribunal’s trial of former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, indicted as responsible for atrocities during the Bosnian and other Balkan wars.