RUSSIA: Russia yesterday handed over a key Bosnian war crimes suspect to the UN war crimes court, two days after Moscow was criticised for blocking efforts to bring him to trial.
Dragan Zelenovic, a former Bosnian Serb military policeman, was arrested in Russia last year when he was found to be using a false passport.
The handover follows criticism by the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia, Carla Del Ponte, that Russia was dragging its feet over the handover.
Ms Del Ponte complained to the UN Security Council on Wednesday of "long and unexplained delays in the transfer of Zelenovic".
She said the delays were straining a completion strategy that aims to finish cases at the court by 2008 and close the court completely by 2010.
Moscow rejected the charge, insisting it was fully co-operating with The Hague.
Mr Zelenovic was arrested in western Siberia, where he had worked on construction sites under an assumed name.
He is accused of involvement in atrocities in so-called "rape camps" in the eastern Bosnian town of Foca. Muslim women and girls were kept in prison, often for months at a time, and sexually abused by Serb forces.
These camps have already seen several suspects jailed in earlier trials, and have established the precedent that someone can be jailed for rape as a war crime.
"Zelenovic has been on the run for 10 years, leaving many victims' quest for justice incomplete," said Nerma Jelacic, an international justice expert with the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network in Sarajevo.
"He is one of the key indictees for the rapes committed in Foca, and the Hague's work on resolving the crimes committed there would have been incomplete had he not been put on trial," she said.
This handover brings to five the remaining Hague suspects still on the run from the court, which was first set up in 1993.
Del Ponte has asked Moscow for information on a second suspect, Vlastimir Djordjevic, a police general accused of ordering the killing of Kosovo Albanian civilians, who was reported to have fled to Russia in 2001.
Last year, sustained pressure by the European Union saw 18 suspects handed over to The Hague.
The hunt continues for two high-profile indictees, former Bosnian Serb president Rakovan Karadzic and his former army commander, Ratko Mladic. Despite Nato raids and diplomatic pressure, both men remain at large, and are presumed to be in the former Yugoslavia.