Police in Spain announced Tuesday that they have arrested an alleged war criminal wanted for committing war crimes and crimes against humanity while commanding the Serb forces during the Bosnian civil war between 1992 and 1995.
According to the Spanish police statement, Veselin Vlahovic was arrested near his home in the southeastern tourist resort of Altea in the province of Alicante. It added that Vlahovic put up strong resistance when he was being arrested on Monday.
Vlahovic, who was born in Montenegro in 1969, was sought three international arrest warrants, and is also wanted in Spain for a wide range of charges, including armed robbery, assault with a firearm and burglary.
The statement said that Vlahovic was arrested as a part of an ongoing investigation into a wave of armed robberies in Spain and was reportedly carrying forged Bulgarian identity documents when detained.
Vlahovic is widely known as "Monster of Grbavica", in reference to the suburb of Sarajevo where he is alleged to have murdered, raped and tortured civilians during the 1992-95 Bosnia civil war. Prosecutors in Bosnia have indicted him in at least 50 cases of alleged war crimes committed during the civil war.
Vlahovic, who is also known as "Batko," was jailed for three years in Montenegro in 1998 for armed robbery. One of the international arrest warrants was issued after he escaped from the Podgorica prison in June 2001.
Vlahovic is also wanted in Serbia, where he shot and killed a man shortly after his escape from the prison in Montenegro in 2001. A Serbian court has sentenced him in absentia to 15 years in jail for that crime, accounting for the third international arrest warrant.
Vlahovic's arrest came amidst the ongoing war crimes trial of former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in the Hague, Netherlands.
Karadzic faces 11 counts of war crimes, including genocide, crimes against humanity and severe breaches of the Geneva Conventions during the 1992-95 war in Bosnia-Herzegovina, including the 1995 genocide of some 8,000 Muslim boys and men in the eastern town of Srebrenica.
Karadzic was arrested in July 2008 in Belgrade ending a 13-year-long run from the law after the International Criminal Court indicted him on war crime charges in 1996. Karadzic, who faces a maximum sentence of life imprisonment, has denied the charges. The case against him is based on evidences and statements provided by the survivors of the the 1992-95 conflict, and the trial is expected to run until 2012.
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