Arrests made 20 years after one of modern Europe’s worst genocides

Almost 20 years after Europe’s worst massacre since the holocaust, Serbian police today arrested eight people believed to be involved in the 1995 mass killing of 8,000 Muslims. The suspects were alleged to have “committed war crimes against the civilian population”, in particular at the Kravica warehouse outside Srebrenica where more than 1,000 Muslims were murdered in July 1995, the prosecutor said in a statement. The prosecution was also searching for several more people believed to be in neighbouring countries, the statement said.

This is the first case in which our office is dealing with mass killings that were directly part of the Srebrenica massacre.

War crime prosecutor’s spokesman Bruno Vekaric

Those arrested were allegedly members of the Bosnian Serb “Jahorina” special police unit that took part in the killing of more than 1,000 civilians and war prisoners at Kravica in a single day, on July 13, 1995. Previous prosecutions in connection with mass killings at Srebrenica have all been mounted by either the Bosnian authorities or the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). Bosnian Serb wartime political and military leaders Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic are currently on trial before the ICTY for genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity, some related to Srebrenica.

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