NATO troops yesterday arrested a Bosnian Serb general accused of committing genocide in the former Muslim enclave of Srebrenica, the site of the worst massacre of the Balkans conflict.
Maj Gen Radislav Krstic was arrested in the US army sector, the NATO-led Stabilisation Force (Sfor) said in Sarajevo.
He is being transferred to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), the UN-mandated war crimes court in The Hague.
Gen Krstic is charged with genocide and complicity to commit genocide for his part in the slaughter of Bosnian Muslims after the fall of the enclave in 1995. Gen Krstic, one of the most senior military officers to appear before the ICTY, is charged with direct personal involvement in the crimes as well as superior responsibility in his position as a corps commander.
The chief prosecutor of the war crimes tribunal, Ms Louise Arbour, said:
"Having regard to the gravity of the charges and the position of the accused, the prosecutor considers this indictment to be very important and the detention of the accused by Sfor to be very significant for the continuing work of the tribunal."
In a separate statement, NATO secretary-general Mr Javier Solana said:
"Persons indicted for war crimes who are still at large should realise that they, too, will be brought to justice."
At the time of his arrest, Gen Krstic was with his driver at Bijeljina in the Republika Srpska, the predominantly Serb component of Bosnia. He had left his base in the eastern town of Sokolac to attend a general staff meeting in Bijeljina.
The war crimes court has officially indicted 56 men for crimes committed during the 1991-95 break-up of the former Yugoslavia.
Gen Krstic will join 25 other detainees in custody at Scheveningen prison, near The Hague, which has provided the ICTY with cells.
Twenty-nine suspects are still at large, including former Bosnian Serb leader Dr Radovan Karadzic and his military commander, Gen Ratko Mladic.
A Bosnian Croat, Drazen Erdemevoic, was sentenced in March by the ICTY to 10 years in prison, reduced to five years on appeal, for his part in the Srebrenica massacre.
He admitted shooting dead between 70 and 100 people in a mass execution in a village outside Srebrenica but said that he would have been killed himself had he not followed orders to carry out the slaughter.
The arrest of Gen Krstic brings to 27 the number of war crimes suspects before the UN war crimes tribunal.
The detainees include 13 Bosnian Serbs, 11 Bosnian Croats, two Bosnian Muslims and one Croat.
They are accused of one or more of the following: genocide, crimes against humanity, violations of the laws and customs of war, and grave breaches of the Geneva convention.
The Srebrenica massacre was the worst single atrocity in Europe since the second World War.
At least 7,000 men are still unaccounted for after Serb forces, under Gen Mladic, brushed aside a contingent of Dutch UN peacekeepers and overran the enclave while UN Protection Force officials in Sarajevo and Tuzla waited for orders from their superiors.
As the commander of the Dutch force, Gen Ton Karremans, negotiated with Gen Mladic about the security of his men, the Serbs rounded up Muslim men of draft age, loaded them into trucks to take them to a remote location, and summarily executed them.
Prior to the fall of the town, anticipating the atrocity, around 12,000 Muslim men had gathered on a nearby hill and decided to gamble their lives on an arduous march through enemy-held territory to Tuzla.
In the days that followed, the area became a killing-field, with Serb forces able to fire at will on the columns of men as they straggled blindly towards safety.
Some were tricked into surrendering by Serb soldiers driving captured UN vehicles.
Fewer than half the Muslims made it to safety.
The full horror only became apparent after survivors of the long march told their stories to reporters, diplomats and human rights activists.
Evidence presented to the International Criminal Tribunal painted a picture, in the words of one judge, of "thousands of men executed and buried in mass graves, hundreds of men buried alive, men and women mutilated and slaughtered, children killed before their mothers' eyes, a grandfather forced to eat the liver of his own grandson".
These were, the judge said, "truly scenes from hell, written on the darkest pages of human history".
The fall of Srebrenica marked a turning point in the Bosnian conflict.
With the Bosnian Serbs seemingly bent on humiliating the UN peacekeeping force, the international community was forced to adopt a more vigorous approach, leading to a strategy of massive air strikes to protect the remaining safe areas.
Gen Mladic and Dr Karadzic were indicted for genocide.
No UN officials were ever held responsible for the failure to prevent the massacre at Srebrenica. The Dutch troops who had witnessed the Serb operation were ordered to remain silent.