Bosnian police arrest 7 war crimes suspects

Bosnian police have arrested seven former army soldiers on suspicion of killing 20 Bosnian Serb civilians during the 1992-95 war.

According to a Friday statement from the war crimes prosecutor’s office of Bosnia, the suspects attacked a group of civilians, mainly women, children and elderly people, as they were fleeing fighting in 1992.

The statement describes the killings as the worst wartime killing of Serbs in eastern Bosnia.

Bosnia set up a war crimes prosecutor’s office and court in 2005 to help the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague by dealing with lower-level cases on a national basis.

The inter-ethnic war in Bosnia left about 100,000 people, most of them Muslims, dead and half of the country’s population of 4.3 million became refugees or internally displaced persons.

In July 1995, Serb forces attacked Srebrenica, a town located near the border with Serbia, and a designated “safe area” protected by UN peacekeeping troops, killing more than 8,000 Muslim men and boys.