A former Hartford woman who is accused of committing war crimes in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the 1990s has pleaded guilty to charges related to lying to obtain U.S. citizenship, according to federal officials.
Nada Radovan Tomanic, 53, of West Virginia, formerly of Hartford, Connecticut, is a naturalized U.S. citizen from Bosnia and Herzegovina, according to federal officials, and she pleaded guilty on Nov. 10.
She served with the Zulfikar Special Unit of the Army of Bosnia and Herzegovina in the 1990s during the armed conflict in the region and participated in the physical and psychological abuse of Bosnian Serb civilian prisoners, along with other soldiers, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.
When she applied for U.S. naturalization in 2012, Tomanic denied having served in a detention facility or in any other situation involving the detention of others and she also denied having committed a crime for which she had not been arrested – specifically, the crime of inflicting serious bodily harm under the Criminal Law of the Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia, a news release from the Department of Justice says.
They said she was under oath during her interview with a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services officer and was legally obligated to answer questions truthfully but again lied about her service in a detention facility and past criminal conduct.
“The defendant obtained the privileges of U.S. citizenship through lies and deceit, concealing the violent crimes she committed in Bosnia and Herzegovina,” Acting Assistant Attorney General Matthew R. Galeotti of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division said in a statement.
“Covering up past human rights abuses to attain U.S. citizenship is an egregious offense, and I thank our law enforcement partners both here in the U.S. and in Bosnia and Herzegovina for investigating this matter to ensure that justice is done,” U.S. Attorney David X. Sullivan for the District of Connecticut said in a statement.
Tomanic pleaded guilty to one count of procuring citizenship contrary to law, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.
She is scheduled to be sentenced on Feb. 3.
The FBI is investigating the case along with the Department of Homeland Security’s Human Rights Violators and War Crimes Center, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services’ Office of Fraud Detection and National Security and the FBI’s International Human Rights Unit.