Spanish police have arrested an alleged Serbian war criminal known as the "Monster of Grbavica" and wanted for the murders of more than 100 people during the Bosnian war, the interior ministry said yesterday.
Veselin Vlahovic was detained on Monday near his home in the eastern town of Altea as part of an investigation into a gang which was carrying out burglaries in Spain, it said in a statement.
He is the subject of three international arrest warrants, including for genocide for "more than 100 killings in Bosnia, as well as for rapes and acts of torture committed" during the 1992-95 war, the statement said.
It said he was carrying fake Bulgarian identity documents at the time of his arrest.
Known as the "Monster of Grbavica", after the Sarajevo suburb where he committed his alleged war crimes, Mr Vlahovic was born in Montenegro in 1969.
He escaped from a prison near the Montenegrin capital of Podgorica on June 18, 2001 where he was serving a three-year sentence for robbery and other crimes, the statement said.
Just three days later, he shot dead a man outside a bar in Serbia, for which he received a 15-year sentence in absentia, it said.
He is also wanted for a series of other violent crimes carried out after the Bosnian war.
Spanish police were also seeking Mr Vlahovic in connection with a series of burglaries, as well as for a shootout at a brothel in the northeastern town of Tarragona in November 2004.
A spokesman for Bosnia's prosecutor's office confirmed to AFP that Mr Vlahovic is wanted in Sarajevo for war crimes against Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Croats committed at the outbreak of the war.
"Vlahovic was a paramilitary and is suspected of murders, serious abuse, looting" in the Sarajevo Grbavica suburb, the spokesman, Boris Grubesic, said without elaborating.
He said Sarajevo has not yet received official notification from Spain of his arrest.
Before the war he was a suspect in a series of robberies. When the war broke out he joined a Serb paramilitary group which was part of the notorious "White Angel" units that controlled Serb-held parts of Sarajevo including the Grbavica suburb.
He left Bosnia soon after the war ended and moved to Podgorica, where he kept a low profile, until his arrest in 1998.
Bosnia's inter-ethnic war between its Croats, Muslims and Serbs claimed some 100,000 lives and displaced $2.2 million others. It left the country split into two semi-autonomous halves - the Muslim-Croat Federation and the Serbs' Republika Srpska.