EAGLE BASE, Bosnia-Herzegovina (AP) — NATO troops on Sunday arrested a former Bosnian Serb police chief indicted by the international war crimes court for murder, rape and other crimes during the 1992-95 Bosnian war.
Stevan Todorovic was apprehended without incident in the northern Bosnian town of Bosanski Samac, about 44 miles northwest of here, a NATO statement said.
But Todorovic’s lawyer, Igor Pantelic, said his client told him by telephone from the U.N. detention center in The Netherlands that he had been kidnapped from a summer house in the Serbian mountain resort Zlatibor by masked men who blindfolded him and took him across a border river to Bosnia.
Todorovic, 41, has been indicted by the U.N. war crimes tribunal in The Hague, Netherlands, for “grave breaches, violations of the laws or customs of war and crime against humanity” allegedly committed in 1992 when he was police chief of Bosanski Samac.
Todorovic is the ninth indicted suspect to be picked up in Bosnia by NATO forces and the 26th suspect in custody out of 58 suspects indicted.
The operation took place a few hours before U.S. Defense Secretary William Cohen arrived in Bosnia for a one-day visit.
It also came days after Bosnian Serb ultranationalist Nikola Poplasen defeated the U.S.-backed incumbent for president of the Bosnian Serb republic in this month’s