Suspect Arrested In Croatia Massacre

A principal suspect in the 1991 massacre of more than 200 people in the Croatian city of Vukovar was arrested Friday by the international war crimes tribunal.

Slavko Dokmanovic, 47, the Serb mayor of Vukovar, was taken into custody in the eastern Slavonia region of Croatia and was taken to the war crimes tribunal in The Hague, Netherlands, the United Nations said

This is the first time U.N. officials have arrested a suspect in the former Yugoslavia. U.N. administrators in eastern Slavonia have law enforcement powers, while NATO troops in Bosnia have not.

Dokmanovic was indicted by the tribunal March 26, 1996, for his role in a November 1991 incident in which Serb paramilitary forces took about 260 men from the hospital in Vukovar - a city seized by Serbs in Croatia’s 1991 war - transported them to Ovcara and allegedly shot them.

Investigators exhumed a mass grave near Ovcara in 1996 and recovered more than 200 bodies, the U.N. said.

Dokmanovic’s indictment was issued secretly and no details of the charges against him were immediately available.