A man wanted on suspicion of war crimes in the former Yugoslavia has been arrested in Kenya where he was running a water sports business for years, police and colleagues said.
The man was named locally as Igor Majeski, in his 60s, by police sources and colleagues at the Whitesands hotel, just north of the Indian Ocean coast city of Mombasa, where he worked.
”He’s been a wanted man for a long time and the arrest was made after thorough investigations by security agents,” a Kenyan police officer, who did not want to be named, told Reuters.
He said the man was wanted by an international tribunal, but gave no further details.
A spokesperson for the prosecutor at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague declined on Friday to comment on the arrest, adding that she had no information to provide. The court had also declined comment.
There are still two fugitives on the run from the ICTY, the most prominent of whom is Bosnian Serb military commander Ratko Mladic (67), who has been indicted for genocide.
The other fugitive is Croatian Serb leader Goran Hadzic, who is wanted for crimes against humanity.
The detainee in Mombasa was to be flown to the Kenyan capital Nairobi on Friday.
Workers at the hotel were stunned.
”I was shocked. The suspect in question has been operating his water sports company for over 25 years. When he first came here, he had the right papers and was given space to operate on those grounds,” Whitesands manager Mohammed Hersi told Reuters.
Reuters TV footage, taken in January 2008 for a story on tourism in the area, shows the arrested man standing in shorts and T-shirt outside his water sports shop on the beachfront.
Other workers at the hotel described him as a jovial man who has always mingled easily with tourists and others.
Kenyan police were due to hold a news conference at 1pm in Nairobi. — Reuters