Former U.N. war court convict arrested in Bosnia

A former Bosnian Serb policeman who has already served time in prison for taking part in a massacre during the 1992-1995 war was arrested Monday on fresh war crimes charges.

Bosnian police detained Darko Mrdja along with two other ex-members of his police unit, Radenko Marinovic and Milan Gavrilovic.

Prosecutors accuse the trio – as well as a fourth suspect who is already behind bars for a separate war crime – of murdering non-Serb detainees in the early months of the Bosnian conflict.

They are suspected of having killed at least 10 people being transferred to detention camps in the northwestern town of Prijedor and a nearby village in July and August 1992, the prosecutor’s office said in a statement.

Mrdja was in 2004 sentenced to 17 years in jail by the UN’s International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague after pleading guilty to taking part in the mass execution of some 200 Muslim and Croat civilians whose bodies were thrown off a cliff.

Mrdja, now 48, was released in 2013 after serving more than two-thirds of his sentence. He then returned to Bosnia.