U.S. Army troops Thursday acted for the first time to capture an alleged Bosnian war criminal accused of killing at least 16 Muslims.
The troops rushed from unmarked vans parked in the Serb-dominated city of Bijeljina to seize the former concentration camp commander accused of abusing or terrorizing scores of others.
Goran Jelisic, who described himself as a "Serb Adolf," was surrounded without incident as he left his apartment.
He then was transferred to Tuzla, site of the main U.S. military base in Bosnia, and immediately flown to The Hague, where he was placed in the custody of officials from the International War Crimes Tribunal there.
The U.S. action was planned in advance, officials said. But it came during a week in which human rights groups have sharply criticized the Clinton administration for refusing to let U.S. troops seize any of the dozens of the indicted war crimes suspects still at large, including hard-line Serb leader Radovan Karadzic and former Serb military chief Ratko Mladic.
U.S. forces provided backup support to British troops that fatally shot one Serb and captured another last July and to Dutch troops that seized two Croats in December.
The two Bosnian entities - the Serb Republic and Croat-Muslim federation - are required under the 1995 Dayton peace accord to surrender all accused war criminals within their jurisdictions.
The tribunal charged Jelisic with genocide and crimes against humanity. The charges grew out of reports that he systematically killed or abused Muslims who had been detained in the city of Brcko and at a concentration camp in Luka.
In an interview last month on Dutch radio, Jelisic said he had no regrets for his actions, saying he slept well because "I never used knives to kill people. . . . That's why God invented the pistol."