A former Serb commander accused of war crimes in the Balkans was being hunted by Australian police yesterday after disappearing in the wake of a court ruling that he could be extradited to Croatia.
Dragan Vasiljkovic, 55, an Australian who also has Serbian citizenship, lost a four-year legal battle on Tuesday when Australia’s High Court approved his extradition and reinstated a 2006 warrant for his arrest.
Croatia holds Vasiljkovic, whose Australian name is Daniel Snedden, responsible for torturing and killing Croat soldiers and civilians, as well as a foreign journalist, when he commanded a Serb paramilitary unit during Croatia’s 1991-1995 independence war.
PRISON
“Mr Snedden is now required to be committed to prison to await the Minister for Home Affairs’ final determination whether or not to surrender him to Croatia to face prosecution for war crimes offences,” a spokeswoman for Australia’s Attorney-General Robert McClelland said.
Vasiljkovic, known as “Captain Dragan” during the war in Croatia, won an earlier appeal against extradition when a lower court found he had grounds for believing he could be punished or imprisoned because of his nationality or political opinions.
Last week, the presidents of Croatia and Serbia promised a new era in relations, effectively resuming ties after a year of silent hostility.
ATROCITY
On Wednesday, Serbia’s parliament apologized for the 1995 killing of thousands of Bosnian Muslims in the eastern enclave of Srebrenica, the worst atrocity in Europe since World War Two.
Police were yesterday searching Vasiljkovic’s last known residence in the town of Boambee, north of Sydney. Vasiljkovic did not attend the court and police had no power to arrest him until after the High Court ruling.
Australian Home Affairs Minister Brendan O’Connor and McClelland will have the last say on whether Vasiljkovic will be extradited to Croatia.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema