Nato-led troops swooped on a former Bosnian Serb prison camp commander wanted for genocide yesterday, serving a warning on indicted war criminals still at large in Bosnia.
Mr Goran Jelisic, who dubbed himself the "Serb Adolf" and bragged to the media about the number of Muslims he had butchered during the 1992-95 Bosnia war, was arrested by United States peacekeeping troops early yesterday outside his home in the eastern town of Bijeljina.
"This morning at approximately 8 a.m. Sfor elements in Bosnia encountered Goran Jelisic on the streets of Bijeljina and took action to detain him," a spokesman, Maj Louis Garneau, told reporters in Sarajevo.
Serb political sources in Bijeljina, a stronghold for hardline nationalists who back the Serb wartime leader, Mr Radovan Karadzic, told Reuters that Jelasic was detained as he walked to his car outside his apartment building.
US troops, who patrol the area around Bijeljina, have played a support role in previous Sfor arrests. Yesterday's was the third in seven months.
Mr Jelisic (29) was expected to be flown to the Netherlands to be taken into the custody of the International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia.
The tribunal charged Mr Jelisic last July with genocide during a murderous campaign of "ethnic cleansing" while he was in charge of the Serb-run Luka prison camp, near Brcko in northern Bosnia, in May 1992.
In the indictment UN prosecutors said hundreds of Muslim and Croat men were systematically killed at the Luka camp. Mr Jelisic was personally indicted "for the murder of more than 16 persons, torture, theft, plunder and ordering the murder of many others."
NATO said that in a recent interview with a Dutch newspaper Mr Jelisic had bragged that he was known as the "Serb Adolf", and challenged the international community to bring him to justice.
The Hague tribunal, set up in 1993, has convicted and sentenced two of about 80 men charged with war crimes. Mr Jelisic will join 20 other suspects in custody. The rest remain at large.