Bosnian Serb wartime general Ratko Mladic was arrested in Serbia on Thursday after years on the run from international genocide charges, opening the way for the once-pariah state to approach the European mainstream. The general, accused of orchestrating the massacre of 8,000 Muslim men and boys in the town of Srebrenica and a brutal 43-month siege of Sarajevo during Bosnia's 1992-5 war, was found in a farmhouse owned by a relative, a police official said.
"Mladic was handcuffed and whisked away," said the official, who said Mladic had been co-operative during the arrest. A friend of the Mladic family said he had been put on a plane to the international war crimes tribual in The Hague, but Serbia said he was still in its custody. "On behalf of the Republic of Serbia I can announce the arrest of Ratko Mladic. The extradition process is under way," Serbian President Boris Tadic told reporters in Belgrade.
Tadic confirmed Mladic, 69, had been detained in Serbia, which had long said it could not find a man who was armed and funded by the late Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic and is still seen as a hero by many Serbs. "This removes a heavy burden from Serbia and closes a page of our unfortunate history," Tadic said. Mladic was arrested in the village of Lazarevo, near the north-eastern town of Zrenjanin around 100 km (60 miles) from the capital Belgrade in the early hours, the police official said.
PSUEDONYM Bosnian Muslim survivors said the news was bittersweet. "I have been waiting for years for this criminal, who gave himself the right to take away my children and force me out of my town, to face justice," said Kada Sehomerovic, who lost her husband, son and two brothers when Bosnian Serbs under Mladic seized Srebrenica, designated at the time as a "UN safe area".
A Mladic family friend earlier told Reuters Mladic had been taken to the headquarters of the Serbian intelligence agency after an interior ministry official said police had arrested a man going by the name of Milorad Komadic on an anonymous tip. The European Union said Mladic's arrest would show that Serbia, which was under international sanctions over the war in Bosnia and then bombed by Nato to stop atrocities in Kosovo in 1999, wanted to move forward on European Union membership.
"This is an important step forward for Serbia and for international justice," European Union foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton Ashton said in a statement. "We expect Ratko Mladic to be transferred to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia without delay. Full co-operation with the ICTY remains essential on Serbia's path towards EU membership," she added.