War crimes suspect arrested
A Bosnian Serb paramilitary accused by the United Nations war crimes tribunal of some of the worst atrocities in the Bosnian war has been arrested in Argentina.
Argentine Federal Police said that Milan Lukic was arrested early yesterday in Buenos Aires, following an “international request”.
Lukic was under detention in one of the city’s stations, waiting to be interrogated by a judge, police said.
Lukic was indicted by the tribunal in The Hague, Netherlands, in 2000 for crimes against humanity.
He has also been sentenced to 20 years in prison in Serbia for war crimes, but has been on the run since late 1990s.
Senior Serbian government officials confirmed the arrest. Lukic is among top war crimes suspects wanted by The Hague court.
The UN tribunal has charged Lukic with abduction and the killing of 20 Muslims from Serbia that took place in 1993 at a border area between Serbia and Bosnia.
Earlier this year, he was also sentenced in absentia by a Serbian court to 20 years imprisonment for his role in the abduction of 16 Muslims from a bus in eastern Bosnia in 1992.
According to the UN war crimes indictment, Lukic in 1992 organised a group of paramilitaries who between May 1992 and October 1994 “committed, planned, instigated and ordered the executions” of Bosnian Muslims on the territory of Visegrad and elsewhere in the Bosnian Serb-controlled territory.
He is charged with cruel and inhumane acts against non-Serbs, persecutiom on political racial and religious grounds, crimes against humanity as well as unlawful detention, humiliation, terrorising and psychological abuse of Bosnian Muslims.
Lukic was a member of the notorious paramilitary group called the Avengers.
He was the second Serb war crimes fugitive to be arrested in Argentina this year. Nebojsa Minic, accused by Serbia of war crimes in Kosovo, was arrested in May in the western Argentinean town of Mendoza after a tip from the US-based Human Rights Watch.
The two top Bosnian Serb war crimes fugitives, wartime Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic and military commander Gen. Ratko Mladic, remain at large.
