Germany arrests Bosnian Serb war crimes suspect

German police have arrested a former member of the Bosnian Serb forces who is suspected of taking part in the detention and killing of Muslim civilians during Bosnia’s 1990s war, prosecutors in Sarajevo said Monday.

Milorad Obradovic was arrested in the Munich region and German authorities have launched procedures for his extradition to Bosnia, the prosecutor’s office said in a statement.

The 51-year-old is suspected of participating in the detention of some 120 Bosnian Muslim civilians near the northwestern city of Prijedor in July 1992, at the start of the conflict.

The civilians were later shot dead, the statement said.

Obradovic is also accused of personally killing three detained civilians at Prijedor’s municipal football stadium.

The trial against nine wartime members of Bosnian Serb military and police forces accused over the same crimes opened in April last year before a Sarajevo court.

Another Bosnian Serb, Slobodan Knezevic, was arrested in December in Montenegro within the same investigation.

Around 3,200 people were killed by Bosnian Serb forces in the Prijedor area during the war, and the remains of more than 770 of them have still not been found, according to Bosnia’s Missing Persons Institute.

Around 100 mass graves have been uncovered in the area, the latest of them discovered in September around 140 kilometres (91 miles) southeast of Prijedor.

The remains of at least 86 people were exhumed from the grave in Koricanske Stijene.

Bosnia’s 1992-1995 war between its Croats, Muslims and Serbs broke out as Yugoslavia fell apart and claimed some 100,000 lives.