France has extradited to Bosnia a former ethnic Serb solider accused of taking part in the burning alive of more than 50 Muslim civilians during the country’s 1990s war, prosecutors said Sunday.
Radomir Susnjar, 62, known also as ‘Lalco,’ was identified as living in France by an investigation by Bosnian prosecutors.
He was arrested in France in 2014 and released under court supervision before being arrested again earlier this month in Seine-Saint-Denis, a region north of Paris.
A Bosnian court charged him in 2017 with taking part in the incident in which members of Bosnian Serb military and paramilitary forces held Muslim civilians inside a house in Visegrad in eastern Bosnia, the statement said.
“The house was then set on fire, while Susnjar and others were shooting at it to prevent civilians from fleeing.”
Only a few people escaped with their lives. The victims included women, children and elderly people.
The fire was one of a number of atrocities during the Bosnian war for which two Bosnian Serb former paramilitaries were sentenced by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY).
In 2012, the ICTY upheld Milan Lukic’s life sentence and reduced his cousin Sredoje Lukic’s sentence to 27 years in jail.
Between April and June 1992, at the start of Bosnia’s war, Serb forces killed more than 1,500 civilians in Visegrad and its surroundings, according to the Bosnian Institute for Missing Persons.
Bosnia’s 1992-1995 war between its Croats, Muslims and Serbs was the bloodiest conflict in the series of wars that accompanied Yugoslavia’s collapse.
It claimed around 100,000 lives.
(Source: expatica)
