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Bosnian Serb Arrested For Slaughter Of Muslims
BANJA LUKA, Bosnia-Hercegovina, April 15 (News Agencies) - A Bosnian Serb army commander wanted for the slaughter of thousands of Muslims in Bosnia's worst wartime massacre was arrested Sunday and is to be sent to The Hague to face trial.
Lieutenant Colonel Dragan Obrenovic was detained by three men in civilian clothing at 1:00 pm (1100 GMT) in the eastern town of Zvornik, in the Serb-run half of Bosnia, his lawyer, Krstan Simic, told AFP.
The men pushed Obrenovic into a car that sped off into the nearby Muslim-Croat-run part of Bosnia, away from Bosnian Serb police who might have blocked the arrest, he said. Local police in the Muslim-Croat Federation were shown a warrant from the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, he said.
Following his arrest, U.N. war crimes prosecutors questioned Obrenovic twice over the mass killings of Muslims in the Bosnian town of Srebrenica, Simic said.
Obrenovic had been commander of the Zvornik headquarters during the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, the lawyer said, but stressed his client was just "a suspect" at this stage.
Srebrenica, a Muslim enclave proclaimed a safe haven under the protection of Dutch U.N. peacekeepers, fell to Serb forces in July 1995. Some 7,000 Muslims are believed to have been executed in the weeks that followed.
NATO chief George Robertson said in a statement from Brussels that Obrenovic was arrested under a sealed indictment from the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia for war crimes committed between July and November 1995.
The statement said that, in his role at the time as commander of the Bosnian Serb Zvornik Brigades, Obrenovic was accused "of being responsible for the extermination of thousands of Bosnian Muslim males, complicity of genocide, violation of the laws and customs of war, crimes against humanity, and grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions of 1949 including murder, torture, and racial and religious persecutions."
Robertson said he commended the SFOR troops for the arrest, which he called "another step in NATO's drive to arrest the remaining war crimes indictees."
He added: "There will be no hiding place for anyone accused by the ICTY of these horrific crimes. Let today's arrest serve as a warning to those with guilty consciences. It is time to turn yourself in."
Since June 1997, SFOR has arrested and transferred to The Hague 21 suspects, not including Obrenovic. Three Bosnian Serb war crimes suspects have been killed in SFOR snatch operations.
Despite those actions, however, the two top indictees sought by ICTY over the Srebrenica massacre - wartime Bosnian Serb political leader Radovan Karadzic and his army commander Ratko Mladic - still remain at large.
The arrest of Obrenovic came nearly three weeks after the top ICTY prosecutor, Carla Del Ponte, visited Bosnia and pressed NATO to intensify its efforts to arrest war crimes suspects.
She warned on March 28th that the war crimes tribunal may decide to raise the issue of the mandate of SFOR soldiers at the U.N. Security Council "if they are not arresting fugitives ... in the next few months."
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