Bosnia Arrests 12 For Wartime Killings Of Women, Children

Bosnian police arrested 12 people Monday, including former Serb police and soldiers, suspected of massacring 29 Muslim women and children at the outset of the country’s 1990s wars.

The suspects were being held on suspicion of crimes against humanity for the July 1992 killings which were part of a wider campaign of slaughter in the northwestern region of Prijedor, according to the state prosecutor’s office.

At least three other suspects were still being sought and Bosnian authorities will seek international warrants for their arrest. Two others were already in Bosnian custody in what prosecutors labelled “one of the most complex” war crimes cases there.

The crimes were committed within a “wide and systematic attack of (Serb) army and police against the Muslim population of the village of Zecovi… in which more than 150 victims were killed,” prosecutors said.

Investigators have evidence the 29 women and children were killed and buried in a mass grave, but their remains have yet to be found.

Forensic experts have so far exhumed 450 victims from a mass grave discovered last year in an abandoned mine at Tomasica, in the Prijedor municipality.

The bodies are believed to be those of Muslims and Croats tortured and killed by Bosnian Serb forces at the start of the Balkan country’s 1992-1995 war.

As many as 900 victims could be buried in what is believed to be one of the largest mass graves dating from the inter-ethnic conflict following the break-up of the former Yugoslavia.

Bosnian Serbs took control of the Prijedor region in April 1992, forcing non-Serbs to leave their homes before destroying them.

Families were split up and thousands of people were forced into three detention camps in the northwest, where they were held in squalid conditions, with many tortured and executed.

Photographs of emaciated prisoners at Omarska — reminiscent of the Nazi death camps — broadcast in the summer of 1992 shocked the world and drew international attention to the Serb campaign of so-called “ethnic cleansing”.

The former Bosnian Serb political and military chiefs, Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, are currently standing trial before a UN tribunal in The Hague and on charges that include their role in the atrocities in the Prijedor region.