Sarajevo - Bosnian Serb war crimes suspect Zdravko Tolimir was transported Friday from Bosnian capital Sarajevo to The Hague, where he is to be tried before the UN War Crimes Tribunal, authorities in Sarajevo confirmed.
The former Bosnian Serb general Tolimir, 59, was transported by NATO plane after he spent night in the NATO base Butmir, near Sarajevo Airport.
NATO Spokesman in Sarajevo Derek Chappel confirmed that NATO was involved in providing safe transfer to Tolimir.
Zdravko Tolimir was the third most wanted Bosnian Serb war crimes suspect, following the top-positioned former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic and army commander general Ratko Mladic.
Tolimir was assistant commander of Bosnian Serb intelligence and security and was one of seven closest assistants to Mladic.
Bosnian Serb police in coordination with Serbian police arrested him near the eastern Bosnian Serb town of Bratunac Thursday when he tried to cross border between Serbia and Bosnia without documents.
Before he was arrested, the police said, Tolimir was hiding in Serbia.
As the high-ranking officer of the Bosnian Serb army during the 1992-1995 war in Bosnia-Herzegovina, general Tolimir was one of the key-players involved in the 1995 massacre in the former eastern Bosnian Muslim enclave of Srebrenica.
Bosnian Serb troops massacred up to 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men after capturing the Srebrenica area on July 11, 1995, and expelled more than 30,000 Muslim women, children and elderly from the enclave.
Srebrenica was under the UN's protection when the massacre happened.
Just a couple of days later Tolimir called on Muslim population of another eastern UN safe zone, Zepa, to leave the place or would face the same fate as people in Srebrenica.
The ICTY indicted Tolimir in 2005, charging him with war crimes, genocide, crimes against humanity and violations of the laws and customs of war.
The international community's High Representative in Bosnia-Herzegovina, German diplomat Christian Schwarz-Schilling, welcomed Tolimir's arrest, stressing that other war crimes suspects that remain at large must be apprehended as soon as possible.
'Although nearly 12 years have passed since genocide was committed in Srebrenica, the need to bring those responsible to justice is as great today as it was in 1995,' said Schwarz-Schilling.
'I expect the Bosnian Serb police to build on yesterday's success and to help deliver all remaining war-crimes suspects rapidly to justice, including in particular Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic,' he said.
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