Posted on 01/16/2005 6:15:36 AM PST by mark502inf
BANJA LUKA, Bosnia (Reuters) - A commander of a Bosnian Serb wartime prison camp where several hundred Muslims were killed has surrendered, Bosnian Serb police said on Saturday.
Savo Todovic helped run a Serb-run camp in Foca, an eastern town in which some 1,500 Muslims were killed early in the 1992-95 Bosnian war. The exact number of those killed in the camp has never been determined but exceeds 300.
Todovic has already been transferred to the U.N. war crimes tribunal in the Hague, where he is now being held, a prosecution spokeswoman at the tribunal said.
Earlier, the Bosnian Serb Republic's Interior Ministry said in a statement Todovic had "voluntarily surrendered on the territory of the RS (Serb Republic)."
Bosnian Serb authorities are under strong Western pressure to make their first war crimes arrest. Most Bosnian Serb war crimes suspects have so far been arrested by NATO (news - web sites) peacekeepers in Bosnia while some of them surrendered in Bosnia and Serbia.
Todovic has been charged on 18 counts of crimes against humanity, violations of the laws and customs of war and grave breaches of international conventions.
The number of inmates at his camp rose to 760 at one point and about 300 still remain unaccounted for.
The U.N. war crimes tribunal's indictment said he was "in charge of selecting detainees for killings, beatings, interrogations, forced labor, solitary confinement and exchanges."
He was charged together with Foca detention camp commander Milorad Krnojelac, snatched by NATO troops in 1998, and fellow camp guards commander Mitar Rasevic, who gave himself in to Serbian authorities in 2003.
Rasevic is awaiting trial while Krnojelac was sentenced to 15 years in prison.
After Todovic's surrender, 18 publicly indicted war crimes suspects remain at large, including 12 Bosnian Serbs.
Bosnian Serb wartime leader Radovan Karadzic and his ex-military commander Ratko Mladic top the list. They were both indicted twice for genocide, for the 1995 massacre of about 8,000 Muslims in Srebrenica and the war-long siege of Sarajevo.
Bosnian Serb authorities have issued several calls to publicly indicted fugitives to surrender. In December, they even offered them and their families financial reward for prompt surrender but to no avail.
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