A 53-year-old former Hartford resident has been sentenced to thirty months in federal prison for lying on her U.S. naturalization paperwork about her role in the torture of civilian prisoners during the Bosnian War of the 1990s. The sentence, handed down Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Bridgeport, closes a long-running investigation that reached across continents and decades — and it is a reminder that the United States continues to pursue cases against human rights violators who slip into the country by concealing their pasts.

Who the Defendant Is and What She Concealed

The defendant, Nada Radovan Tomanić, is a naturalized U.S. citizen originally from Bosnia and Herzegovina. She was living in Hartford at the time she applied for U.S. citizenship in 2012 and has since moved to West Virginia. On November 10, 2025, she pleaded guilty to one count of procuring citizenship contrary to law — the federal statute that criminalizes obtaining naturalization through fraud or false statements.

According to statements made in court and the underlying court filings, Tomanić served during the 1990s with the Zulfikar Special Unit of the Army of Bosnia and Herzegovina, a military unit that operated during the armed conflict that tore the former Yugoslavia apart. Prosecutors say that, along with other members of her unit, she participated in the severe physical and psychological abuse of Bosnian Serb civilian prisoners — conduct that the court documents characterize as torture and inhuman treatment rising to the level of a war crime.

When she applied for U.S. naturalization roughly two decades later, she was asked, as all applicants are, a series of questions designed precisely to screen out people with this kind of history. She was asked whether she had ever served in a detention facility or otherwise participated in the detention of others. She answered no. She was also asked whether she had ever committed a crime for which she had not been arrested. She again answered no — even though, according to the government, her conduct during the war constituted the crime of inflicting serious bodily harm under the Criminal Law of the former Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia.

The deception was not limited to the written paperwork. During her in-person interview with a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services officer — a conversation conducted under oath, with an explicit legal obligation to tell the truth — she was asked the same questions again. She gave the same false answers.

Why the Lying Is Itself a Federal Crime

One of the things that sometimes confuses readers of cases like this is why the federal charge is for fraud on the naturalization application rather than for the underlying war crimes themselves. The answer has to do with the limits of U.S. jurisdiction. American prosecutors generally cannot charge war crimes committed by foreign nationals against other foreign nationals on foreign soil decades ago — that authority lies, in the main, with the country where the conduct occurred or with international tribunals. What U.S. law does reach, and reaches firmly, is the process by which someone becomes an American citizen.

Lying on a naturalization application is a federal felony in its own right, and it carries consequences well beyond prison time. A person who obtained citizenship through fraud can be stripped of that citizenship in a separate civil proceeding known as denaturalization, and once denaturalized, can be removed from the country. While the court filings here focus on the criminal sentence, cases of this kind frequently lead to denaturalization proceedings as well.

In effect, the naturalization statute functions as a kind of backstop. When the United States cannot directly prosecute atrocities committed abroad, it can still enforce an uncompromising rule at its own front door: applicants have to tell the truth about who they are and what they have done. Breaking that rule — especially to hide conduct this serious — is treated as a significant crime on its own terms.

The Officials’ Statements

The federal officials involved in the case were unusually direct in their public statements. Assistant Attorney General A. Tysen Duva of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division said the defendant “tortured and abused prisoners in Bosnia and then lied to U.S. immigration authorities to live in the U.S. and become a citizen,” and emphasized that “human rights violators are not welcome in the United States.” U.S. Attorney David X. Sullivan for the District of Connecticut framed the case in starker moral terms, thanking investigators on both sides of the Atlantic who had pursued the case across decades. “There is no statute of limitations for human decency,” he said.

FBI Special Agent in Charge P.J. O’Brien of the New Haven Field Office was explicit that the case, in the government’s view, was never really about paperwork. “This case has always been about more than lying on naturalization documents,” he said, noting that investigators uncovered a history of targeting people based on their ethnicity and religion — and expressing hope that the sentencing offered some measure of justice to the victims.

How the Investigation Came Together

The investigative picture here is striking. The FBI led the case in the United States, working closely with the Department of Homeland Security’s Human Rights Violators and War Crimes Center — a specialized unit dedicated precisely to cases like this — and with the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Office of Fraud Detection and National Security. The FBI’s own International Human Rights Unit provided additional support.

The investigation reached well beyond U.S. borders. The Justice Department credited authorities in Bosnia and Herzegovina, including the national Ministry of Justice and the Republic of Srpska Ministry of Interior, as well as Serbian authorities. It also acknowledged the United Nations International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals — the body that inherited the remaining work of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia after it was formally wound down in 2017. The records, testimony, and institutional memory held by these foreign and international partners were, in effect, the evidentiary scaffolding on which the American prosecution was built.

The case itself was prosecuted by Trial Attorney Elizabeth Nielsen of the Criminal Division’s Human Rights and Special Prosecutions Section, working with Assistant U.S. Attorneys Anastasia King and Angel Krull from the District of Connecticut. The Criminal Division’s Office of International Affairs and the Section’s in-house historians also provided assistance — a detail that is worth pausing on, because it underscores just how much of a case like this depends on specialized historical research rather than standard criminal investigation.

Why Cases Like This Still Matter Three Decades Later

The Bosnian War ended in 1995. The conduct at the heart of this case occurred roughly thirty years ago. A reader could reasonably ask why the U.S. government is still devoting investigative and prosecutorial resources to events that predate a good portion of the current population.

The answer, from the government’s perspective, is twofold. The first reason is institutional integrity — the premise that American citizenship carries real moral weight and cannot be allowed to shelter people who obtained it through fraud, particularly fraud that concealed atrocities. If the naturalization process can be gamed by war criminals willing to lie under oath, the entire system loses credibility, and the people who apply honestly are made to stand in the same line as the people who did not.

The second reason is the one investigators tend to emphasize privately: the victims. In a case like this, the surviving victims of wartime abuse — people who in many cases spent years or decades assuming their abusers would never face consequences — are often the only ones who can identify specific perpetrators. Their willingness to come forward, sometimes at considerable personal cost, is what makes these prosecutions possible at all. The federal officials who announced this case went out of their way to credit “the courage of the victims,” and that framing is more than rhetoric: without that testimony, the paper trail alone is rarely enough.

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