NATO troops arrested a Bosnian Serb accused of genocide Monday and the military alliance said the capture should serve as a warning to other fugitives that they had nowhere to hide.
A NATO spokesman said alliance-led SFOR peacekeeping troops had arrested Momir Nikolic and that he was being transferred to the war crimes tribunal for former Yugoslavia in The Hague.
"There were no casualties sustained in the operation by SFOR, Nikolic or anyone in the surrounding area," the spokesman told Reuters.
He gave no details of the capture, but said Nikolic had been arrested for crimes committed in and around Srebrenica, the enclave which fell in 1995 to Bosnian Serb forces.
The capture was followed by a massacre of up to 8,000 Muslim men and boys, Europe's worst mass killing since World War Two. A Bosnian Serb Interior Ministry spokesman told Reuters in Sarajevo that about 20 people in civilian clothes and with balaclavas had snatched Nikolic about noon at a family house in Repovac village, a few miles from Srebrenica.
The NATO spokesman said Nikolic was under indictment for war crimes in and around Srebrenica from July 1995 to November 1996.
He was accused of genocide, forcible transfer, inhumane acts and murder. Nikolic was a first class captain and assistant commander of intelligence in the Bratunac army brigade, he said.
"Today's detention serves as a warning that there will be no hiding place for anyone accused by the tribunal of those horrific crimes," the NATO spokesman added.
About 20 publicly indicted war criminals, including Bosnian Serb wartime leader Radovan Karadzic, are believed to be hiding in the Serb Republic, which forms post-war Bosnia together with a Muslim-Croat federation.