Ratko Mladic arrested: Bosnia war crimes

[Irish_Army01]

Ratko Mladic, wanted by UN prosecutors for war crimes during the Bosnian civil war, has been arrested in Serbia after a decade in hiding.
Serbian President Boris Tadic confirmed the arrest of the former Bosnian Serb army chief at a news conference.
Gen Mladic is accused of a key role in the massacre of at least 7,500 men and boys at Srebrenica in 1995.
He was the most prominent Bosnian war crimes suspect at large since the arrest of Radovan Karadzic in 2008.
President Tadic said work was under way to extradite Gen Mladic to the international war crimes tribunal in The Hague.
The detention, he said, had closed one chapter in Serbian history, bringing the country and the region closer to reconciliation.
It had also opened the doors to membership of the European Union, he added.
Nato chief Anders Fogh Rasmussen hailed the arrest, saying it finally offered "a chance for justice to be done".
In other reaction:
UK Defence Secretary Liam Fox said it was a chance for Serbians to "close a very unhappy chapter in their history"
An Amnesty International legal expert said: "It took more than 15 years but at last the people who suffered have hope that he will be brought to justice"
Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt said: "The European prospects of Serbia are now brighter than ever"
Assumed name
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The road to capture

July 1995: Gen Mladic indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, accused of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes
November 1995: Charges expanded to include the attack on Srebrenica in July 1995
October 2000: Former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic ousted and arrested the following year; Mladic, believed to be living in Serbia, disappears from view
April 2005: Serbian Foreign Minister Vuk Draskovic says Serbian security agents knew Mladic's whereabouts; the intelligence agency describes the allegations as "ridiculous"
February 2006: Chief UN prosecutor demands Serbia step up the hunt and says the failure to arrest him will harm Serbia's EU membership chances
July 2008: Mladic's mentor, Bosnian Serb former political leader Radovan Karadzic, captured
October 2010: Serbia offers 10m euros (£8.7m) for information leading to Mladic's capture and arrest
Gen Mladic was said by Serbian media to have been arrested in Vojvodina, a northern province of Serbia, in the early hours of Thursday morning.
President Tadic would only confirm he had been arrested "on Serbian soil".
He was reportedly using the assumed name Milorad Komodic.
The Serbian president promised that details of the arrest would be released once an investigation had been completed.
Gen Mladic was indicted by the UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague in 1995 for genocide over the killings that July at Srebrenica - the worst single atrocity in Europe since World War II - and other crimes.
Having lived freely in the Serbian capital, Belgrade, he disappeared after the arrest of former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic in 2001.
Speculation mounted that Gen Mladic would soon be arrested when Mr Karadzic was captured in Belgrade in July 2008.
'Not a calculation'

Just before news of Thursday's arrest, UN war crimes chief prosecutor Serge Brammertz accused Serbia of failing to do enough to find Gen Mladic.
Ratko Mladic led Bosnian Serb forces during the 1990s civil war
"The capture is the biggest obligation of Serbia," he said in a report sent to the UN Security Council. "Until now efforts by Serbia to detain fugitives have not been sufficient."
President Tadic rejected criticism that Serbia had only taken action following international pressure.
"It is crystal clear that we did not calculate when we had to arrest Ratko Mladic," he told the news conference on Thursday.
"We have been co-operating with the Hague Tribunal fully from the beginning of the mandate of this government."
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-13561407

[rdret1]

About time.

[greenberetTFS]

Good,this is the year of lets get All the Bad Guys............

Big Teddy

[MtnGoat]

I think it is good of the Serbian Goverment that their Serbian Police or internal Forces got him not not the EU.

[Richard]

I was surprised to hear Bill Hillar hadn't gotten to him first.

Richard

[Irish_Army01]

I said this over on Shadowspear.., The reason I think he all of a sudden was arrested is a direct result of that Unit taking out number 1 on the most wanted list.. In my opinion.


How could Serbia explain to the rest of the world, knowing their aspirations for EU membership, if some one else caught him and he has been in the Country?

[SF18C]

Raise your hand if you "hunted" this guy back in the day!

[Stras]

Originally Posted by SF18C

Raise your hand if you "hunted" this guy back in the day!

glad he's finally caught.. spent a lot of time "hunting" him and the others. looks like 1 left to catch of the 161 on the original list.

May justice be slow and painful for the mastermind of the Srebenica massacre. and may the Dutch remember their failure.


from Fox news 27 May 11:
BELGRADE, Serbia -- A defense lawyer for Ratko Mladic says a Belgrade court has ruled that the former general can be extradited to a U.N. tribunal.

Milos Saljic told reporters the defense will appeal Monday. Court spokeswoman Maja Kovacevic confirmed that the court has determined that Mladic is fit to stand trial in The Hague, Netherlands.

The War-crimes suspect, Mladic looked hollow-cheeked and shrunken after a decade and a half on the run, nothing like the beefy commander accused of personally orchestrating some of the worst horrors of the Balkan wars.

A police photo of Mladic moments after his arrest in a tiny northern Serbian village shows a clean-shaven Mladic with thinning hair wearing a navy blue baseball hat and looking up with wide eyes, as if in surprise.

The Bosnian Serb wartime army commander is facing international war crimes charges, including the slaughter of 8,000 Muslim men and boys in the Bosnian town of Srebrenica.

A Thursday extradition hearing was adjourned due to what Mladic's lawyer claimed was his poor health.

Serbian war crimes prosecutors say the health issue appears to be a tactic to delay his extradition to the U.N. tribunal in The Hague, Netherlands.

"What's important is that his identity has been established," said deputy war crimes prosecutor Bruno Vekaric. "It now depends on his defense whether they will launch appeals, but a maximum deadline for his extradition is a week."

A spokeswoman said the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal was capable of dealing with any of Mladic's health problems.

Mladic's wife Bosiljka and son Darko walked into the courthouse to visit Mladic in the jail which is located in the same building, but did not speak to the media when they left.

Mladic, 69, was one of the world's most-wanted fugitives -- the top commander of the Bosnian Serb army during Bosnia's 1992-95 war, which left more than 100,000 people dead and drove another 1.8 million from their homes. Thousands of Muslims and Croats were killed, tortured or driven out in a campaign to purge the region of non-Serbs.

He was accused by the U.N. International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes for the massacre of Muslims by Bosnian Serb forces in eastern Bosnia and the relentless four-year siege of Sarajevo.

War crimes prosecutor Serge Brammertz was due to give the U.N. a report next month critical of Serbia's lack of cooperation with the hunt for Mladic and other fugitives.

The Netherlands had used such reports to justify blocking Serbia's efforts to join the EU, and the arrest could help Serbia shed its image as a pariah state that sheltered the men responsible for the worst atrocities of the Balkan wars of the 1990s.