Serbia arrests 7 suspected of Bosnia’s Srebrenica massacre

Police in Serbia have detained seven people suspected of playing a role in the 1995 massacre of Srebrenica Muslims in eastern Bosnia during the Balkans War, regarded as Europe's worst civilian slaughter since World War II.

The detainees "are suspected to have committed war crimes against the civilian population," especially at the Kravica warehouse outside Srebrenica, where more than 1,000 Muslims were murdered in July 1995, the prosecutors said in a statement released on Wednesday.

The suspects, identified by their initials, are reportedly members of Bosnian Serb wartime police.

"It is important to stress that this is the first time that our prosecutor's office is dealing with the mass killings of civilians and war prisoners in Srebrenica," said Bruno Vekaric, the lead prosecutor in the case, adding, "We have never dealt with a crime of such proportions."

The eastern town of Srebrenica was a UN-protected area that was besieged by Serb forces throughout the 1992-95 war for Serb domination in Bosnia.

However, the UN troops offered no resistance when the Serbs overran the majority Muslim town on July 11, 1995, rounding up Srebrenica’s Muslims and killing over 8,000 men and boys in a few days.

The killings were later labeled as genocide by the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.

MSM/NN/HRB

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