Bosnian Police Arrest Two Wartime Camp Guards

A Bosnian forensic expert shows a pocket watch found in a mass grave near Kamenica, where civilians were held during Bosnia's war.

SARAJEVO (Reuters) - Bosnian police today arrested two former Bosnian Serb detention camp guards suspected of taking part in the killing of about 50 non-Serb civilians and prisoners in the 1992-95 war, the prosecutor's office said.

Ratko Dronjak, 47, was arrested in the northern town of Laktasi and Dragan Rodic, 46, near the northwestern town of Drvar, it said in a statement.

Dronjak was commander of a detention camp in the village of Kamenica near Drvar in which civilians and prisoners of war were detained from 1992-95. Rodic served as a guard in the same camp, it added.

"The two are suspected of taking part in the killing of around 50 civilians and prisoners of war and inflicting grave bodily injuries on a large number of them," the office said.

It said detainees "were held in cruel and humiliating conditions in an atmosphere of terror, without basic food staples and were exposed to everyday interrogation, beatings, torture, harassment and psychological abuse."

The two men are suspected of violating international humanitarian law and committing crimes against humanity and will be handed over to the prosecutor in the course of the day, the office said.

The Bosnian war crimes court was set up in 2005 to relieve the burden on the United Nations war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague and to try mid- and low-ranking cases from the Bosnian war that claimed 100,000 lives.