Sat, 07:32 25 Jul 2009 GMT17

 

Bosnian Serb policemen arrested on war crimes charges
01 Jul 2009 11:34:32 GMT
Source: Reuters
SARAJEVO, July 1 (Reuters) - Bosnian police on Wednesday arrested a Serb policeman suspected of taking part in a massacre of more than 200 Muslims and Croats early in the 1992-95 Bosnian war, the state prosecutor's office said.

Sasa Zecevic, 39, was arrested in a police station in the northwestern town of Prijedor and will be handed over to the prosecutor's office, the office said in a statement.

The mass killing in central Bosnia occurred on Aug. 21, 1992, as part of an early wave of ethnic cleansing as rebel Bosnian Serb forces clashed with Bosnian Croats and Muslims during the break-up of the former Yugoslavia.

"Zecevic is suspected of taking part in the execution on Mount Vlasic of more than 200 Muslim and Croat civilians who had been taken off the buses that transported them from a Prijedor area detention camp to the central town of Travnik," the statement said.

The victims of the massacre, most of them men, were told they were being released in a prisoner exchange and were driven from the Trnopolje detention camp to some woods.

Former Bosnian Serb policeman Darko Mrdja, who confessed to taking part in the massacre on Mount Vlasic, was jailed for 17 years in 2004 by the Hague-based International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY).

Bosnia's war crimes court was set up in 2005 to allow the Hague-based tribunal to focus on the most serious cases from the conflict in which around 100,000 people were killed.

It is currently trying eight Bosnian Serbs for the massacre of Mount Vlasic, of whom two have confessed. (Reporting by Maja Zuvela)
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Sudan's President Omar Hassan al-Bashir waves to supporters at an event organized by the Sudanese embassy in Cairo July 17, 2009. Bashir was indicted in March by the International Criminal Court ...



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