Serbia's last major warcrimes fugitive, a Croatian Serb wartime leader indicted for crimes against humanity during the 1991-95 Croatian war, has been arrested, a Serbian official has confirmed.
Goran Hadzic was a key figure in the breakaway Krajina Serb republic in Croatia, and after the arrest of wartime General Ratko Mladic earlier this year, he was Serbia's last remaining figure sought by the United Nations warcrimes tribunal in the Hague.
Serbia's president Boris Tadic called a special news conference, at which he confirmed Goran Hadzic was arrested in the region of Fruske Gore.
Hadzic was born in September 1958 in Croatia and worked as a warehouseman prior to the outbreak of war there. In the spring of 1990, he was elected to the council at Vukovar and later joined the Serbian Democratic Party.
Hadzic was elected president of the self-declared 'Republic of Serbian Krajina' in Croatia in September 1991 and remained in that position until December 1993.
He fled from his house in Novi Sad, 80 km (50 miles) northwest of Belgrade, in 2004 to avoid arrest after the international indictment. He was also wanted in neighbouring Croatia for genocide. The house was searched again in 2009.
The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia indicted Hadzic in July 2004 on 14 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity during the 1991-1995 conflict.
He is charged with a number of crimes committed in eastern Slavonia.
They include murder and persecution of the Croat and non-Serb civilian population; prolonged imprisonment of civilians in detention facilities where torture, beatings and killing was not uncommon; forcible transfer of tens of thousands of non-Serbs from across the area under his control to make it part of a new Serb-dominated state.
Reuters