Bosnia and Herzegovina / National Tribunals

"A house near the Jewish cemetery in Sarajevo burns after being hit by a mortar shell in September1994." (Peter Andrews/PA)

Bosnia Arrests War Crimes Suspect
Reuters dispatch in The Irish Times, November 2, 2011
"Bosnian police today detained a Bosnian Serb ex-police commander suspected of having ordered the murder of 10 Muslim civilians at the start of the 1992-95 siege of Sarajevo, prosecutors said. Goran Saric (47), was arrested in the northeastern town of Bijeljina, prosecutors' office spokesman Boris Grubesic said. About 11,000 people were killed in the 43-month siege of Sarajevo by separatist Bosnian Serbs, and more than 100,000 in total during the country's war following its secession from Serbian-led federal Yugoslavia. Saric, who was the police commander in the Serb-held part of the capital Sarajevo in June 1992, has been investigated by Bosnian state prosecutors and charged with war crimes. 'Defendant Goran Saric ... is suspected of having ordered the murder of 10 Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) civilians in June 1992, and the capture and persecution of a large number of people, mostly Bosniak women and children, from the Sarajevo neighbourhoods of Nahorevo, Poljine and others,' the statement said. Bosnia's war crimes court was launched in 2005 to try lower-ranking cases and ease the burden on the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY). The court is now trying two other Bosnian Serbs for atrocities committed against the non-Serb population in parts of Sarajevo seized by Serb forces opposed to Bosnia's independence backed by its Muslims and Croats."
[n.b. This is the complete text of the dispatch.]