The Supreme Court in The Hague upheld the conviction of a suspect for man­slaughter of a fellow student at Saba University School of Medi­cine on April 15, 2015, the court announced Tuesday.

The woman Kavya Guda (24) was killed in her apartment in Saba. She was found lying on her stomach on her bed, with her hands behind her back and her dress pulled up to her hip.

An autopsy showed that she had died in the night due to strangula­tion and possibly also by obstruc­tion of breathing through the nose or mouth, and that her arms and wrists were probably tied. Semen from the suspect, fellow student Senad Cejvan, a native of Bosnia and Herzegovina living in Missouri, United States, was found in her body. ‘Traces were also found on her dress whose DNA profile matched that of the suspect.

Cejvan (37) stated, among other things, that he had sexual con­tact with the woman early in the evening of April 14, 2015, but not one day later, and that after he had brought the woman home with another person, he first vis­ited the other person and then went straight home.

In its verdict of June 24, 2021, the Joint Court of Justice ruled that the statements of the ac­cused were manifestly false. The court established that the suspect violently killed the woman during sexual intercourse and sentenced him to 11 years in prison for man­slaughter and possession of a large amount of child pornogra­phy. The defendant appealed this judgment in the Supreme Court in The Hague.

The suspect’s lawyers asked the Supreme Court to quash the conviction. Among other things, they complained about the Appeals Court’s rejec­tion of an alternative sce­nario put forward by the defence. Complaints were also made about the use of the accused’s statements as evidence, which the court regarded as apparently false. The attorney general concluded that the appeals should be dismissed.

In its judgment, the Su­preme Court devoted a consideration to the in­clusion of an implausible or untrue statement by a suspect in the assessment of the evidence. The Su­preme Court argued first and foremost that, as hap­pened in this case, the court may, when weighing the evidence, assign signifi­cance to a certain extent to the circumstance that the suspect made a statement which, in the court’s opin­ion, is not plausible or false.

In this case, the court re­garded some statements by the suspect as mani­festly false and used them for evidence. According to the Supreme Court, these statements were made to conceal the fact that the occasion when the suspect left his semen traces with the victim was directly re­lated to the moment when he committed violent acts that caused her death, and to conceal that he came walking from the victim’s home during the night of her death.

According to the Court of Appeals, the suspect’s statements were incompat­ible with the facts and cir­cumstances emerging from other evidence in this case. The Supreme Court con­sidered this judgment of the Court of Appeals suf­ficiently substantiated and in accordance with the re­quirements set by the Su­preme Court for the use of such a statement as evi­dence.

The Supreme Court also considered the Court of Appeal’s opinion that the alternative scenario as put forward by the defence, in which not Cejvan but a friend of the victim would have killed her, was not plausible and insufficiently substantiated.

With the judgment of the Supreme Court, Cejvan’s conviction and the 11-year prison sentence have be­come irrevocable.

The Daily Herald.