Crack British troops who captured two Bosnian Serb brothers for war crimes arrested the wrong set of twins, embarrassed Ministry of Defence officials admitted last night.
In a military black comedy of errors, British special forces pounced on two brothers in the north-west Bosnian town of Prijedor last night, believing them to be the twins Predag and Nenad Banovic, alleged to have committed acts of brutality as prison guards.
The men were taken under guard to the UN international war crimes tribunal at The Hague where they were expected to stand trial for 42 war crimes and crimes against humanity.
But UN officials there discovered that the suspects were not the twins alleged to have tortured and beaten to death Muslims at the infamous Keraterm prison camp, 100 miles from Sarajevo, in 1992; they were just twins from the same town.
The tribunal admitted yesterday afternoon that the arrested twins were the unfortunate victims of a case of mistaken identity. The embarrassment to the tribunal was heightened by the praise with which senior politicians had initially greeted the arrests.
The men's arrival in The Hague had been greeted by much NATO and British self-congratulation.
The two men were arrested on Wednesday evening in the northwestern Bosnian town of Prijedor. British troops of the NATO-led SFOR took credit for the catch.
"The actions of British SFOR troops last night . . . show that we have not let the [war crimes] issue drop. Every indictee belongs in The Hague," the British Defence Secretary, Mr George Robertson, and the Foreign Secretary, Mr Robin Cook, said early yesterday.
But a few hours later, tribunal spokesman, Mr Christian Chartier, delivered the news that NATO had got it wrong. "These two persons are not the Banovic brothers . . . They are people who have absolutely nothing to do with this," he said.
"We have received information confirming what they say . . . We are making arrangements for them to be sent back as soon as possible," Mr Chartier continued.
He refused to be drawn on the men's real identity apart from saying they were also twins.
"I'm not going to tell you about people who have absolutely nothing to do with us," he said.
The international community's top official in Bosnia, Mr Carlos Westendorp, said the mistaken arrest of the two Bosnian Serbs appeared to be a "human" error.
"If it is a mistake, it is a human mistake. This may happen," he told a press conference in Vienna after meeting the Austrian Foreign Minister, Mr Wolfgang Schuessel, whose country currently holds the EU presidency.
The tribunal had earlier hailed the arrests as a significant moment in its history, bringing the tally of publicly indicted war suspects in its custody above the number at large.
The departure of the twins will leave 27 detainees in Scheveningen detention centre outside The Hague.
For the tribunal, the arrests initially came as a welcome snippet of good news on a day when it made public the outcome of an internal inquiry into the suicide in detention of one of its top war crimes suspects.
Slavko Dokmanovic, the former Serb mayor of Vukovar, was found hanged in his cell on June 29th, one week before the verdict was due in his trial.
The court's investigation, led by Judge Almiro Rodrigues, concluded Dokmanovic hanged himself with a tie after staging two unsuccessful suicide attempts.