Croatians Arrest One of Their Own in War Crimes Case
Croatian police have made their first arrest of a Bosnian Croat wanted on charges of war crimes, the Justice Ministry announced Sunday.
Zlatko Aleksovski, 36, is one of six Bosnian Croats indicted for alleged war crimes against Muslim civilians in central Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1993.
Aleksovski, who headed a Croatian prison near the Bosnian city of Mostar, was arrested Saturday in the Croatian port of Split, a public prosecutor said.
Another suspect, former Bosnian Croat military leader Gen. Tihomir Blaskic, surrendered in April to the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia.
Croatia recently amended its constitution to facilitate extraditing suspects wanted by the tribunal, which is based in The Hague.
The crimes that the six are accused of were carried out on “such a wide-scale and widespread basis, and implemented in such a systematic fashion, that they . . . effectively destroyed or removed almost the entire Muslim civilian population in the Lasva Valley” in 1992 and 1993, court papers say.
Court documents say the Bosnian Croats used civilian prisoners as “human shields,” once placing more than 200 of them around their headquarters when it was under fire from the Bosnian government army.
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