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Russia hands war crimes suspect to Bosnia

Posted on: Friday, 9 June 2006, 04:43 CDT

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)

Source: REUTERS

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