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Croat camp commander handed over to UN tribunal

AMSTERDAM: The U.N. criminal tribunal for former Yugoslavia on Tuesday took custody of a Bosnian Croat prison camp commander, one of the first defendants to be charged with war crimes against Bosnian Serbs.

Zdravko Mucic, named in a March 22 tribunal indictment, was handed over by Austrian police at Amsterdam's Schiphol airport and immediately taken to the tribunal's detention centre near The Hague.

Mucic, 41, was arrested in Vienna on March 18 at the tribunal's request and will appear at a preliminary hearing at the tribunal in The Hague on Thursday.

The tribunal last month charged Mucic and three Bosnian Muslims with war crimes against Serbs.

Mucic, charged with commanding the Celebici camp at Konjic in central Bosnia between May and November 1992, was identified last month by the Bosnian Serb SRNA news agency as a Croat.

The tribunal said Mucic was accused of responsibility for crimes committed by his subordinates including at least 14 murders, rape and torture. He was also accused of being responsible for causing great suffering and forcing detainees to have oral sex with each other, it said.

Mucic and his deputy Hazim Delic were indicted along with Zejnil Delalic, a Bosnian Muslim military commander, and Celebici camp guard Esad Landzo.

Delalic, commander of a unit of Bosnian Muslim forces from June to November 1992, was arrested by German police in Munich last month. The tribunal said then that it expected to take custody of Mucic and Delalic "within weeks".

Landzo and Delic remain at large, although Bosnian authorities have given the tribunal assurances that the accused will be arrested and handed over.

The two were accused of beating men to death with wooden planks, baseball bats, shovels and pieces of cable as well as torturing detainees, many in their 60s and 70s, with pliers, corrosives, electrical currents and hot metal pincers.

On one occasion they were alleged to have nailed a Muslim political badge to a man's forehead. Delic also faces two charges of multiple rape.

Mucic is the second Croat to be taken into tribunal custody after Bosnian Croat General Tihomir Blaskic gave himself up to the tribunal on April 1.

The tribunal now has four men in its custody from the 57 war crimes suspects it has charged. To date the tribunal has indicted 46 Serbs, eight Croats and three Muslims.

German authorities are also holding Bosnian Serb Goran Lajic, one of 13 Serbs charged last July with atrocities against Muslims at the Keraterm prison camp in Prijedor, northwest Bosnia. The tribunal has said it expects Lajic, arrested in Nuremberg, to be transferred soon.-Reuter