Milan Lukic, one of the most wanted war criminals from the carnage in Bosnia, was due to appear before a judge in Buenos Aires on Tuesday after being captured on Monday.
After seven years on the run from war crimes tribunal in The Hague, Lukic was seized outside his apartment in Argentina, after collecting his wife and daughter at the airport.
”When he got out of the taxi, police appeared everywhere,” said the superintendent of the building. ”He had lots of money on him — dollars, euros.”
Lukic is unlikely to be transferred to the tribunal for several weeks. Argentina is not party to the fast-track transfer agreements that former Yugoslav and some European countries have agreed with the tribunal.
Lukic was first named and his alleged crimes detailed in The Guardian in 1996, and he was charged two years later. The indictment accuses him of the ”extermination of a significant number of Bosnian Muslim civilians, including women, children and the elderly”.
The crimes were committed in the town of Visegrad in the Drina river valley in eastern Bosnia, and include transporting Bosnian Muslim civilians on to Visegrad’s famous Ottoman bridge and killing them. He is further charged with locking scores of Bosnian Muslims, including babies and children, into houses and incinerating them.
Lukic’s chosen hiding place has fuelled investigators’ suspicions that Argentina is becoming a safe haven for Serbian fugitives, as it was for Nazi war criminals. Most of Lukic’s fellow indictees have hitherto gone underground in Bosnia, Serbia or the Russian Federation, but he is the second alleged war criminal from the former Yugoslavia to be found in Buenos Aires.
In June, extradition from Argentina to Serbia was agreed for Nebojsa Minic, wanted for war crimes in Kosovo. ”There may be a network there,” said one official close to the investigation.
The tribunal’s hunt appears to have succeeded with the belated cooperation of Serbian authorities. Rasim Ljajic, president of the Serbian Council for Cooperation with The Hague, said that Lukic’s arrest had followed ”increased operational activities of our security services in cooperation with the international community”.
Florence Hartmann, spokesperson for The Hague’s chief prosecutor, Carla del Ponte, said on Tuesday that the tribunal was ”happy with the cooperation of the Serbian special services, and the Argentinian police were also co-operative”.
For years, neither Serbia nor Bosnian Serbs showed an interest in handing over Lukic, who was seen around Visegrad and in Serbia, allegedly running criminal and extortion rackets.
He was arrested and tried three times in Serbia, but released. But in September 2003, a Belgrade court sentenced him in absentia to 20 years for the massacre of Bosnian Muslims. ”Unlike some war criminals, he was never a hero,” said a source close to the hunt. ”He was a criminal, he became trouble wherever he went, even in Serbia.”
Then, in April 2004, the Sarajevo-based Balkan Investigative Reporting Network (Birn) published an account, based on intelligence sources, that claimed Lukic had enjoyed — but lost — the protection of the so-called Preventiva network, which hides the fugitive leader Radovan Karadzic.
Lukic replied to Birn, in an e-mail from hiding. The server from which the e-mail was sent was traced to Brazil. – Guardian Unlimited Â