Four Bosnian Serbs Arrested On War Crimes Charges

Bosnian police arrested four Bosnian Serbs on Tuesday suspected of taking part in a massacre of more than 200 Muslims and Croats early in the 1992-95 Bosnian war, the state prosecutor's office said.

The mass killing in central Bosnia occurred as part of an early wave of ethnic cleansing as rebel Bosnian Serb forces clashed with Bosnian Croats and Muslims during the break-up of the former Yugoslav federation.

Damir Ivankovic, Dusan Jankovic, Zeljko Stojnic and Zoran Babic were arrested in the northwestern town of Prijedor, the state prosecutor's office said in a statement.

"They are suspected of taking part in the execution on Mount Vlasic of more than 200 Muslim and Croat civilians who had been taken off the buses that transported them from a Prijedor area detention camp to the central town of Travnik," it said.

The victims of the massacre, most of them men, were told they were being released in a prisoner exchange and were driven from the Trnopolje detention camp to some woods.

There, the prisoners were forced to kneel by the edge of a ravine and shot. A dozen survived by tumbling or jumping down the cliff.

Former Bosnian Serb policeman Darko Mrdja, who confessed to taking part in the massacre on Mount Vlasic, was jailed for 17 years in 2004, by the U.N. war crimes tribunal in The Hague.