THE HAGUE, Netherlands — NATO peacekeepers have arrested a Bosnian Serb detention camp commander more than five years after the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal accused him of raping, torturing and killing Muslims.
Dragan Nikolic, 42, had been the first suspect ever indicted by the U.N. court.
He was brought to the tribunal's detention facility in The Hague early Saturday, a day after NATO troops detained him in the American-run sector of northern Bosnia. There were no casualties in the capture.
"He has arrived," said tribunal spokesman Jim Landale.
In Vlasenica, Nikolic's hometown, friends and family said he dropped out of sight years ago. Neighbors said even his mother had not heard from him and some relatives assumed he was dead.
The Nov. 4, 1994 indictment, amended in February 1999, charges Nikolic with war crimes, crimes against humanity and grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions at the Susica camp, a detention facility set up near the eastern Bosnian town of Vlasenica at the outset of the 1992-1995 Bosnian conflict.
If found guilty of any single charge he could be sentenced to life in prison.
An estimated 8,000 Muslims and other non-Serbs were detained at Susica between May and October 1992, according to the indictment. Guards beat prisoners on a daily basis, killing an unspecified number of them, and raped female inmates.
Nikolic is accused of personally raping four women, clubbing two inmates to death with wooden sticks and torturing and beating four more, in addition to his command responsibility for the abuse of other detainees.
"The detainees at Susica camp were guarded at all times by armed Serb soldiers under the command of Dragan Nikolic," said the indictment.
In 1995, the tribunal heard testimony from former prisoners at Susica.
Ibro Osmanovic, a 30-year-old factory worker, said that in the summer of 1992, 550 Muslims were kept crowded in a concrete-floored hangar. He said Nikolic called two of the Muslims out of the hangar and had guards beat them so severely that one died within a half hour and the other died the next day.
The tribunal now has in its custody 39 of the 94 suspects publicly indicted since the court was established in 1993 to prosecute perpetrators of atrocities in the wars following the 1991 breakup of the Yugoslav federation.
The most wanted suspects — Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, wartime Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic and former military chief Ratko Mladic — remain at large.
Friday's arrest came just a week after a visit by NATO Secretary-General Lord Robertson to the tribunal, the first by such a high-ranking NATO official. Nikolic is the seventh war crimes suspect to be apprehended by NATO since Robertson's appointment some six months ago.
On April 3, Momcilo Krajisnik, a close ally of Karadzic, was arrested by French NATO troops at his home in eastern Bosnia. Krajisnik was the most senior Bosnian Serb arrested so far and has been charged with every war crime on the Yugoslav tribunal's statute.
"NATO is determined to play its role in helping to bring indicted war criminals to justice," Saturday's NATO statement quoted Robertson as saying. "Those indicted war criminals who remain at large have no permanent hiding place."