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Croatia arrests three ex-policemen suspected of killing Serbs
Jun 20, 2011, 14:26 GMT
Zagreb/Belgrade - Croatian police on Monday arrested three people suspected of war crimes during the Yugoslav wars in the early 1990s, national television HRT reported.
The three men are accused of killing Serbs in the area of Sisak, a city 30 kilometres southwest of Zagreb, between 1991-93.
The accused are Djuro Brodarac, 67, police chief in Sisak at the time of the alleged crimes; Vlado Milankovic, 49, a former commander of a police commando unit in the area; and Drago Bosnjak, 53, a member of a police and paramilitary unit.
Brodarac also served as a de-mining adviser to the Croatian government. He and Milankovic allegedly ordered the crimes, while Bosnjak carried them out, the report said.
About 600 Serbs were executed or disappeared in the Sisak area during the 1991-95 war in Croatia.
The investigation leading to the arrests focused on the killing of about a dozen Serbs, HRT said, with the aim of frightening other Serbs into fleeing the area.
Croatia split from Yugoslavia on June 28, 1991. The secession sparked a war against the Yugoslav army and Belgrade-backed Serb rebels who controlled as much as a third of the country.
Many Croats were shocked in April when the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia sentenced three Croatian generals to long prison terms because they ordered the ethnic cleansing of areas inhabited by Serbs in 1995.
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