NATO says seizes Karadzic's wartime defense chief

Haaretz ^ | 3/4/2004 | Reuters

[yonif]

BANJA LUKA, Bosnia - NATO peacekeepers said on Thursday they had detained fugitive former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic's wartime defense minister for his alleged support of Serb war crimes suspects.

General Bogdan Subotic, defense minister during the 1992-95 Bosnian war and now a military adviser to the Bosnian Serb presidency, was detained on Wednesday night at his home in Banja Luka, the NATO-led Stabilization Force (SFOR) said in a statement.

It was the peace force's third arrest operation in two months targeting the support network of persons indicted by the UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague. Subotic is expected to be taken to a secret location and questioned.

Karadzic and his military chief Ratko Mladic, also still at large, are top of the tribunal's most wanted list. Both are accused of genocide during the siege of Sarajevo and the 1995 Srebrenica massacre of thousands of Muslims.

SFOR, which has been criticized in the past for not doing enough to hunt down war crimes fugitives, has in recent months stepped up efforts to tighten the net around Karadzic.

In January, peacekeepers detained two of Karadzic's alleged helpers during and after a series of raids on his family's houses in the wartime Bosnian Serb stronghold of Pale, near the capital Sarajevo. Both men were later released.

Karadzic, on the run for nearly eight years, had been widely reported to be hiding in eastern Bosnia and neighboring Serbia and Montenegro. But UN Chief Prosecutor Carla del Ponte said last month they were both in Belgrade. Serbian officials say they have no evidence of this.

[Oplenac]

Nothing will come of this detention. Haaretz should look closer to home for its war criminals.