ARGENTINA: Argentina was preparing to extradite one of Bosnia's most notorious war criminals to the UN court at The Hague yesterday, after his more than five years on the run ended abruptly in an affluent area of Buenos Aires.
Milan Lukic was seized by Argentine police after being tracked for months by the country's intelligence services, in close co-operation with their counterparts in Serbia-Montenegro and other countries, according to officials in Belgrade.
He is expected to be flown to The Hague to face charges relating to what his indictment calls "a reign of terror" from 1992 to 1994, when he allegedly led paramilitaries in committing "a multitude of crimes in [ Bosnia's] Visegrad municipality, including murder, torture, assault, looting and the destruction of property."
Last month a Serbian court sentenced Lukic in his absence to 20 years in prison for an attack in which his gang - dubbed "The Avengers" or "White Eagles" - dragged 16 Muslims from a bus and tortured and killed them.
He is also accused of murdering more than 100 Muslims in two incidents in 1992, when he and his comrades barricaded men and women in buildings before razing them with grenades and riddling them with bullets.
"The procedure for his extradition will now follow," said Rasim Ljajic, the minister in charge of Serbia-Montenegro's often-equivocal co-operation with the UN war crimes court.
"He will most certainly be extradited directly to the Hague tribunal, and I expect this to happen in the coming days," Mr Ljajic added.
Lukic is the second war crimes suspect seized in Argentina in recent months.
Nebojsa Minic, the commander of a notorious group known as "Lightning" that operated in the Serbian province of Kosovo during Belgrade's 1998-99 war with ethnic-Albanian separatists, was arrested in the city of Mendoza in May.
Although he is not wanted by the UN court, Serbia has demanded his extradition on suspicion of murdering 12 Kosovo-Albanian families in 1999.
The arrest of Lukic leaves eight of the most infamous Serb and Bosnian Serb war crimes suspects still at large.
Rumours abound over the whereabouts of wartime Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic and his military henchman, Gen Ratko Mladic, with the former suspected of hiding in remote Orthodox churches dressed as a priest, and the latter said to have fled to Russia.
The UN tribunal believes both are still on the run in Bosnia or Serbia-Montenegro.
