Serbian authorities on Wednesday arrested eight people in connection with the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, in which up to 8,000 Muslim men and boys were killed at a UN safe haven when the shelter fell to Bosnian Serb forces.

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“This is the first such case involving people directly suspected of taking part in the Srebrenica massacre,” Bruno Vekaric, Serbia’s deputy war crimes prosecutor, told Reuters.

Arrested at multiple locations across Serbia, the men are accused of killing more than 1,000 Bosnian Muslims at the Kravica warehouse just outside Srebrenica and in the process committing “war crimes against the civilian population", the prosecutor said in a statement.

Vekaric said seven suspects were arrested early on Wednesday while an eighth was detained later in the northern city of Novi Sad. Other suspects remain at large.

“He (the eighth suspect) is on his way to Belgrade ... There are another five suspects still at large in the region, we are after them as well,” he said.

The accused are former members of a Bosnian Serb special wartime police unit that operated under the interior ministry.

An official involved in the investigation said those detained included unit commander Nedeljko Milidragovic, known as “Nedjo the Butcher”, who became a successful businessman in Serbia after the war.

“He and others are suspected of bringing some 15 busloads of men from a prison camp in Srebrenica to Kravica, where they were summarily executed,” the official said.

Peacekeepers overrun

The tiny Muslim enclave of Srebrenica was under UN protection until July 11, 1995, when it was seized by ethnic Serb forces under the command of Ratko Mladic, who is currently on trial for genocide and war crimes at The Hague in connection with the war in Bosnia.

Mladic's troops overran the lightly armed Dutch peacekeepers guarding the safe area, where thousands of Muslims from surrounding villages had gathered to seek UN protection.

The bodies of the 7,000 to 8,000 victims were dumped in mass graves. Nearly 90 percent of the victims have so far been exhumed and identified through DNA analysis.

Serbia arrested Bosnian Serb political leader Radovan Karadzic in 2008 near Belgrade, where he was working as a doctor during more than a decade on the run. Mladic, his military commander, was arrested in 2011 after more than 16 years of evading capture.

Both are currently facing trial at the UN’s International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) at The Hague for war crimes, including those that occurred at Srebrenica.

The arrests of Karadzic and Mladic were key to unblocking Serbia’s bid to join the European Union. But Belgrade remains under pressure to go after those responsible for war crimes committed during the 1992-1995 collapse of Yugoslavia, when some 100,000 people – most of them Bosnian Muslims – were killed.

Dutch ruled liable

An ICTY trial chamber issued the tribunal’s first genocide conviction in August of 2001 in ruling that the Srebrenica massacre constituted genocide, which refers to acts committed with the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”.

In 2007 the UN’s highest court, the International Court of Justice, concurred in ruling that the acts committed at Srebrenica were genocide.

The suspects will most likely stand trial in Serbia and not at the ICTY in The Hague, where Serbia’s late president, Slobodan Milosevic, faced trial.

July will mark the 20th anniversary of the massacre, which the ICTY says was Europe’s worst atrocity since World War II.

The Dutch Supreme Court ruled in 2013 that the Netherlands was liable for the deaths of three Bosnian Muslim men during the Srebrenica massacre, even though its forces there were part of a UN peacekeeping mission. The decision upheld a 2011 appeals court judgment that was seen as setting a worrying precedent because it held the Dutch state responsible for events that happened during a multinational UN mission.

A Dutch court ruled last year that the Netherlands was also liable for the deaths of more than 300 others at Srebrenica. The families of those killed had filed suit against the Dutch government, accusing the nation’s UN peacekeepers of failing to protect the victims.

The Mothers of Srebrenica group, representing some 6,000 widows and other victims' relatives, have been seeking justice for years for the massacre.

(FRANCE 24 with AP, AFP and REUTERS)

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