Bosnian Serb Arrested Over Srebrenica Massacre

Zoran Tomic was a member of the special police unit in the town of Sekovici during the 1992-95 war.

Bosnian police have arrested a Bosnian Serb policeman suspected of taking part in the 1995 Srebrenica massacre of about 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys, the office of the war crimes prosecutor said on Tuesday.

Zoran Tomic was a member of the special police unit in the town of Sekovici during the 1992-95 war.

He was suspended from his job by international peace envoy Miroslav Lajcak last year along with 34 other Bosnian Serb policemen suspected of involvement in the Srebrenica killings.

"As a member of the special police Zoran Tomic is suspected along with other members of his unit of actively taking part in ... committing genocide in the Srebrenica area from July 10-July 19, 1995," the prosecutor's office said in a statement.

During the war, the eastern enclave had been protected by United Nations forces but was overrun by Bosnian Serb forces commanded by General Ratko Mladic on July 11, 1995.

The Bosnian Serbs separated Muslim men from women and children in Srebrenica and in only one week executed them en masse at several sites in eastern Bosnia. They hunted down and killed men who tried to escape through woods.

Tomic is suspected of taking part in the search of Muslim homes in Srebrenica, detention of Muslims and their forced re-allocation to areas under the control of the Bosnian Muslim-dominated army, the statement said.

He is also suspected of taking part in the capture and detention of over 1,000 Muslim men at the farming cooperative in the village of Kravice, and the killing of Muslim men in the Kravice warehouse, the statement added.

The Bosnian war crimes court, set up in 2005 to take some of the load from the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague, has tried and convicted several Bosnian Serbs over Srebrenica.

The ICTY indicted Mladic and Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic over the Srebrenica massacre, seen as Europe's worst since the World War Two. Both men are still at liberty.