Police arrest Serb war crimes suspect

Elizabeth Nash
Monday 27 May 2002 00:00 BST
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A Serb accused of war crimes in Bosnia by the United Nations tribunal has been arrested in Yugoslavia, it was reported yesterday.

The arrest of Ranko Cesic was the first by police of a suspect on the list of Serbs wanted by the UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague. He was among 23 Serb indictees the Yugoslav authorities were urged to surrender under Western pressure to co-operate with the tribunal.

He is suspected of killing at least 12 people in the Luka camp near the northern Bosnian town of Brcko in 1992.

Mr Cesic, a Bosnian Serb, was being held in Belgrade District Court. It was not immediately clear when he could be extradited to the Netherlands.

The arrest came after the United States ended an aid freeze imposed because of Belgrade's failure to co-operate with the tribunal. Aid resumed after six suspects, including two senior allies of Slobodan Milosevic, turned themselves in. The wartime Bosnian Serb leader, Radovan Karadzic, and his military commander, Ratko Mladic, remain at large.

Mr Cesic was hiding in Serbia, the larger Yugoslav republic that for years was a safe haven for war crimes suspects.

He was indicted in 1995, while the war in Bosnia still raged. An expanded indictment in 1998 accused him and Goran Jelisic of "taking part in a widespread, systematic or large-scale attack directed against the ... civilian population" in Brcko.

The indictment lists four occasions when Mr Cesic, a guard at one of the camps, allegedly beat and shot to death 11 inmates. He is also accused of clubbing a man to death.

In May 1992, he allegedly forced two Muslim brothers to "beat each other and perform sexual acts on each other".

Jelisic was tried and sentenced last year to 40 years in prison for charges that included genocide.

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