SARAJEVO, Nov 5: Bosnian police on Wednesday arrested two Bosnian Serb wartime commanders suspected of taking part in genocide against Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica in July 1995, a police statement said.

The State Protection and Investigative Agency arrested Momir Peles, 59, and Slavko Peric, 61, in the eastern town of Zvornik, where they had served as the Zvornik brigade 1st battalion’s deputy commander and an assistant commander.

The suspects will be handed over to the Bosnian war crimes court’s prosecutor’s office, which had ordered their arrest.

“The suspects will be brought to the Prosecutor’s office due to the grounded suspicion that they committed the criminal offence of genocide ... by participating in the apprehension and execution of 1,700 Bosniak men from the Srebrenica enclave,” the prosecutor’s office said in a statement.

Bosnian Serb forces, commanded by General Ratko Mladic, slaughtered about 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys after the town, which was under the protection of United Nations peacekeepers, fell into their hands in 1995. Most were killed while trying to escape through the woods, either shot down immediately or arrested and brought to warehouses or schools from where they were taken to places of execution, killed and buried in mass graves.

Peles and Peric were suspected of taking part in the execution of 1,700 Muslims in the village of Pilica, where one of the largest mass graves was found, and at the military cooperative at Branjevo, the prosecutor’s office said.

The Zvornik brigade was one of 13 brigades of the Bosnian Serb army that comprised the Drina corps, commanded by General Radislav Krstic, who was jailed for 35 years by the UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague over the Srebrenica genocide.

—Reuters