Sarajevo Police Arrest Suspect in ’93 Slaying of Deputy Premier

Sarajevo police arrested two Bosnian Serbs on Friday and said one of them is suspected of killing a deputy prime minister at a Serbian roadblock during the wartime siege of the city.

The Jan. 8, 1993, killing of Hakija Turajlic, who was shot in a United Nations vehicle in full view of French U.N. soldiers escorting him, provoked angry condemnations from around the world.

But Friday’s arrest sparked Serbian anger, with a crowd grabbing 20 people from a U.N. bus coming from Muslim-Croat territory and threatening to kill them if Serb Goran Vasic and his companion were not freed.

A U.N. spokesman later said all but one of the bus passengers had been released and the crowd dispersed. But Radovan Pejic, a spokesman for the Bosnian Serb police station where the release was negotiated, said four people were unaccounted for late Friday.

Alexander Ivanko, spokesman for the U.N. international police in Bosnia, said Vasic and another man, identified as his brother-in-law, were arrested on the Muslim-Croat side of the suburb of Dobrinja. Vasic had a pistol, he said.

The demarcation line between the Muslim-Croat Federation and the Bosnian Serb substate runs through Dobrinja, a battered suburb near Sarajevo airport.

According to police sources in Sarajevo, Vasic is a former member of the Bosnian Serb forces and lived in the Serbian part of Dobrinja, working as a waiter but also crossing the demarcation line frequently as a smuggler.

Vasic is accused of murder and will face trial in Sarajevo.