SARAJEVO, Nov 13: The UN mission in Bosnia said on Tuesday it had sacked seven local police officers after discovering they either worked in detention camps during the Bosnian war or had failed to fully investigate wartime murders.

Three were Bosnian Serb officers from the northwestern town of Prijedor who were interrogators in nearby Omarska, Keraterm, Betonirka and Manjaca detention camps in 1992, UN spokesman Stefo Lehmann told a news conference.

Thousands of Muslim and Croat civilians were held and hundreds killed and tortured in the four Serb-run camps, of which Omarska was the largest.

The UN International Police Task Force (IPTF), which oversees local police and has powers to remove officials, “has determined that wartime background renders them unfit for service in the police forces of Bosnia and Herzegovina,” Lehmann said.

The UN war crimes tribunal earlier this month found five Bosnian Serbs guilty of crimes against humanity for a “hellish orgy of persecution” in 1992 against non-Serbs at the Omarska camp and jailed them for between five and 25 years.

Last week, Serbian police arrested Bosnian Serb twin brothers charged with beating prisoners to death at Keraterm camp in 1992, and handed them over to the Hague-based tribunal for trial.

The officers identified on Tuesday include three crime inspectors from Prijedor’s main police station, two of whom are already technically retired. Those two are permanently banned from being re-hired, which commonly happens in Bosnia. The other four were fired for failing to fully investigate the wartime murder in 1992 of two Bosnian Serbs, he said.

The IPTF has provisionally certified about 40,000 police officers since the war ended, but as a result of police restructuring, the total number of officers in the separate entities’ police forces had fallen to 23,000. —Reuters