BULGARIA: Bulgarian police arrested a Serb colonel for crimes against humanity yesterday, after he arrived from Belgrade as part of an official military delegation.
Col Cedomir Brankovic was detained after Bulgarian border guards discovered that he was wanted by Interpol and Croatia on charges relating to the wars that dismembered Yugoslavia in the early 1990s.
Bulgarian officials said Col Brankovic, whom Croatia sentenced to 20 years in absentia for crimes allegedly committed in 1991, was accused of ordering lethal attacks on non-Serbs and robbing and destroying Catholic churches and Croat property in several villages.
"We have detained him for 72 hours. After that the court must decide whether to extradite him to Croatia," said Bulgarian official Boiko Borissov.
Meanwhile, Hungary, under pressure from the world's leading Nazi-hunter, has asked Australia to extradite an 86-year-old man accused of torturing and murdering a Jew in wartime Budapest.
Dr Efraim Zuroff, of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Israel, has campaigned for months for the arrest of retired nurse Charles Zentai, for allegedly beating to death 18-year-old Peter Balazs in November 1944 for failing to wear a yellow star identifying him as a Jew.
Mr Zentai, who now lives in Perth and proclaims his innocence, is alleged to have thrown the teenager's body into the Danube, where the Nazis and their local fascist allies disposed of an unknown number of their 600,000 or so Hungarian Jewish victims.
"We very much hope that justice will finally be achieved," Dr Zuroff told the Australian newspaper.