NATO Troops Arrest Bosnian Indicted in ’94

International peacekeepers have arrested a Bosnian Serb detention camp commander, more than five years after the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal accused him of raping, torturing and killing Muslims.

Dragan Nikolic, 42, is one of the first suspects indicted by the U.N. court.

He was brought to the tribunal’s detention facility here early Saturday, a day after North Atlantic Treaty Organization troops detained him in the U.S.-controlled sector of northern Bosnia.

The Nov. 7, 1994, indictment charges Nikolic with war crimes, crimes against humanity and grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions at the Susica camp, a detention facility set up near the eastern Bosnian town of Vlasenica at the outset of the 1992-95 Bosnian conflict.

He could be sentenced to life in prison on any of the charges.

An estimated 8,000 Muslims and other non-Serbs were detained at Susica between May and October 1992, according to the indictment. Guards beat prisoners on a daily basis, killing an unspecified number of them, and raped female inmates.

Nikolic is accused of raping four women, clubbing two inmates to death, and torturing and beating four more, in addition to his command responsibility for the abuse of other detainees.

The tribunal, based in The Hague, now has in its custody 40 of the 94 suspects publicly indicted since the court was established in 1993 to prosecute perpetrators of atrocities in the wars after the 1991 breakup of the Yugoslav federation.

The most-wanted suspects--Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, wartime Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic and ex-military chief Ratko Mladic--remain at large.