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Belgrade police arrest top Serbian war-crime suspect

More than a hundred Serbian police commandos stormed a Belgrade apartment early yesterday and arrested a top war-crimes suspect amid fierce clashes with his hardline nationalist supporters in the street below.

A senior Interior Ministry source confirmed that former Yugoslav National Army colonel Veselin Sljivancanin had been taken into custody, answering a US request to seize him so that Washington could approve further aid to Serbia.

The arrest of Sljivancanin, who had been a fugitive since former president Slobodan Milosevic was toppled in October 2000, climaxed a tense 10-hour standoff outside the flat where he had apparently returned to celebrate his 50th birthday.

Sljivancanin was indicted in 1995 by the UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague for alleged complicity in the massacre of 200 Croat and other non-Serb civilians, after Yugoslav troops captured the Danube port of Vukovar in 1991.

Sljivancanin had threatened to blow himself up rather than hand himself over to international justice. His wife told local reporters he had in the end "surrendered voluntarily."

Several hundred diehard nationalists filled the street on Thursday afternoon when police entered the apartment block, throwing stones, setting fires and provoking violent clashes, the likes of which had not even been seen when Milosevic was himself arrested in an April 2001 drama.

Well over 100 riot police and camouflage-uniformed gendarmes fired tear gas and stun grenades at the hostile crowd before a commando squad began battering down the armored door of Sljivancanin's flat shortly before midnight.

Several police and demonstrators, who included soccer hooligans, were injured in the clashes which flared again briefly after he was driven off to a Belgrade jail.

Sljivancanin's two co-accused in the Vukovar massacre -- one of the most notorious war crimes of Croatia's 1991 to 1995 independence war -- are already in detention at The Hague awaiting trial.

His arrest came two days before the US government was to certify to Congress that Belgrade is cooperating with the tribunal on rounding up war-crimes suspects, a step essential for the release of further economic aid worth a total of US$110 million this year.

A senior US official warned last week that without Sljivancanin in custody, certification would be "a difficult decision," and urged Serbian authorities to find him.

Three Serbian men indicted by The Hague have been transferred to the tribunal in the past month.

The latest arrest leaves former Bosnian Serb president Radovan Karadzic and army commander Ratko Mladic as the two remaining top fugitives indicted for war crimes committed during the violent breakup of Yugoslavia between 1991 and 1999.
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