A 38-year-old Beaverton woman was arrested Wednesday on a request from the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina to send her back to her home country to face war crimes charges, including accusations that she shot civilians and participated in firing squad-style executions.

Rasema Handanovic is being held in the Multnomah County jail pending a detention hearing today in U.S. District Court in Portland.

Handanovic was a member of a Bosnian Army unit, the Zulfikar Special Purposes Detachment, and participated in an April 1993 attack on the village of Trusina that killed 16 civilians and seriously injured four,

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In addition, Handanovic, who would have been 20 at the time, allegedly killed a woman by shooting her two or three times in the chest, the U.S. Attorney's Office said.

The Bosnian government request also accuses Handanovic of using an automatic rifle to shoot and kill an elderly couple and of participating in the executions of unarmed Croatian soldiers and civilians in the village of Gaj. She fired additional shots at close range into those who still seemed alive, the documents said.

She later immigrated to the United States and became a naturalized citizen in 2002. The warrant for her arrest had been issued by the prosecutor's office of Bosnia and Herzegovina in 2009.

Handanovic, also known as "Zolja" and Sammy Rasema Yetisen, was taken into custody by officers from the U.S. Marshals Service and Homeland Security Investigations.

The jail was on lockdown for about an hour after marshals alerted officers that a high-profile inmate was heading their way. Handanovic was booked without incident, said Michael Shults, the jail's chief deputy.

Beaverton neighbors described Handanovic as an unemployed single mother of a 12-year-old boy who often kept to herself and recently started receiving disability for her fibromyalgia. She shared an apartment with her son, parents and sister, they said.

Handanovic told neighbor Debbie Rasmussen that she came to the United States "to get away from everything over there" in Bosnia.

"It totally surprised me," Rasmussen said of Handanovic's arrest. "She never had violent tendencies, or anything like that."

Neighbor Ella Wilbora said she's known Handanovic for more than 10 years as a former co-worker and good friend. Handanovic had mentioned that she had been in a war, that she was kidnapped at one time in a town where people were lying dead in the streets, Wilbora said.

"She was trying to survive... She never told me that she killed anybody," Wilbora said.

The allegations against Handanovic stem from the intense fighting that marked the three-year war among ethnic populations in Bosnia-Herzegovina that began in 1992 as the republic sought independence from the Yugoslav federal government. The three main ethnic groups -- Slavic Muslims known as Bosniaks, Serbs and Croats --fought for political control in a conflict marked by mass murders and other atrocities.

The Bosnia Herzegovina republic today continues to try to bring alleged war criminals to trial, and Handanovic is one of two people rounded up Wednesday in the Trusina killings.

Federal authorities also arrested Edin Dzeko, 39, a naturalized U.S. citizen who lives in Everett, Wash., for allegedly participating in the same attack. Dzeko, 39, appeared in U.S. District Court in Seattle.

In documents filed in support of Handanovic's detention, the U.S. Attorney's Office said that if the allegations are true, they show her to be a danger to the community who committed "abhorrent, wanton crimes -- essentially serial murder."

"She is readily capable of intimidating (or worse) the witnesses who gave statements against her," prosecutors said. "While the witnesses have sought to protect their identity by the use of thinly-veiled pseudonyms, Handanovic will likely identify the witnesses in short order, given the fact that she served with them in the Bosnian military."

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