ENDING a 26-hour armed standoff, police arrested former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic before dawn on Sunday and handed him over to a judge to face charges stemming from a decade of repressive rule. Branislav Ivkovic, a close aide to Milosevic, said Milosevic had surrendered voluntarily ”to include himself in the legal process.” Ivkovic, who was in the compound during the arrest, urged people to ”give the judges a chance to hand out the final verdict” on charges of corruption and abuse of power. The arrest came after an unsuccessful attempt to seize Milosevic, who has been indicted by the U.N. war crimes tribunal for alleged atrocities committed during his harsh crackdown on ethnic Albanians in Kosovo in 1999. Officials had negotiated through the night to persuade Milosevic to surrender peacefully and avoid a bloody confrontation. The police action came the day after a deadline set by the U.S. Congress for Yugoslavia to begin cooperating with the U.N. war crimes tribunal in The Hague, Netherlands. – AP