Bosnian Serb Colonel Arrested for Involvement in ’95 Massacre

NATO-led peacekeepers arrested a Bosnian Serb army colonel Friday who commanded a brigade in wartime eastern Bosnia when thousands of Muslim men and boys were massacred near the town of Srebrenica.

The U.N. war crimes tribunal in The Hague said that Col. Vidoje Blagojevic had been charged with two counts of genocide, five counts of crimes against humanity and one of violating the laws and customs of war.

Blagojevic, 51, was quickly flown to the Netherlands, where a tribunal spokesman said he would probably make his first court appearance next week.

Bosnian Serb Deputy Interior Minister Zeljko Janjetovic said that Blagojevic, who commanded an infantry and engineering brigade of the Bosnian Serb army’s notorious Drina Corps, was detained in the Banja Luka area in northern Bosnia.

The brigade’s zone of operations included the eastern towns of Bratunac and Srebrenica, whose majority non-Serbian inhabitants were killed or expelled during the war.

“He [Blagojevic] reported directly to Krstic,” tribunal spokesman Jim Landale said. Radislav Krstic is the former Bosnian Serb general who last week became the first person convicted by the court of genocide in connection with the Srebrenica slaughter.

Blagojevic’s indictment was made public only after his arrest.

The charges against Blagojevic relate to alleged Bosnian Serb atrocities around Srebrenica. More than 7,000 Muslim men and boys were executed after being caught fleeing a Serbian conquest of the town in July 1995, U.N. prosecutors say.

“Today’s action is another step in NATO’s drive to arrest the remaining war crime indictees,” the North Atlantic Treaty Organization said in a statement.

An association of Srebrenica survivors welcomed the arrest, saying in a statement that Blagojevic was responsible for “genocide in Bratunac in 1992 and in Srebrenica in 1995.”

The group accused him of the 1992 killing of 1,800 Muslim men in a Bratunac school within a two-day period as well as of involvement in the Srebrenica bloodletting, regarded as Europe’s worst atrocity since World War II.

Blagojevic was arriving for a meeting on de-mining with international officials when two British military jeeps and two civilian vehicles approached his car, sources said.

Several people jumped from the vehicles, used rubber bullets to smash the windows in Blagojevic’s car, pulled him out and sped away, eyewitnesses said, speaking on condition of anonymity.