Russia hands war crimes suspect to Bosnia

SARAJEVO (Reuters) – Russia has handed over to Bosnia
Dragan Zelenovic, a Bosnian Serb wanted by the United Nations
war crimes tribunal for rape and torture, the Balkan country’s
war crimes court said on Friday.

Russia transferred Zelenovic to the Bosnian authorities on
Thursday after the U.N. war crimes tribunal’s Chief Prosecutor
Carla del Ponte accused Moscow of dragging its feet over the
case.

“Dragan Zelenovic will appear before the judge for
preliminary proceedings … at 1130 a.m. (0930 GMT),” the court
said in a statement.

Zelenovic, a former policeman, is wanted by the
International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in
The Hague for atrocities committed against Bosnian Muslims in
the eastern Foca region during Bosnia’s 1992-95 war.

Del Ponte told the U.N. Security Council on Wednesday: “The
long and unexplained delays in the transfer of Zelenovic … do
not allow for optimism in the future of the ICTY’s co-operation
with the Russian Federation.”

Medzida Kreso, the court’s president, told the Dnevni Avaz
daily on Friday that the court would detain Zelenovic for 30
days.

“In that period Zelenovic should be handed over to the
Hague tribunal, unless it decides to hand over the case to
Bosnia’s judicial institutions,” Kreso said.

Bosnia’s war crimes chamber was established in 2005 to
alleviate some of the workload of the Hague tribunal. It will
increasingly take over low- and mid-level cases as the Hague
court winds down by 2010.

Zelenovic was arrested last August in the Khanti-Mansiisk
autonomous district of western Siberia where Russian media said
he had been working on construction sites under an assumed
name.

(Additional reporting by Maja Zuvela in Sarajevo)