Fugitive Croatian General Ante Gotovina, one of the three most wanted war crimes suspects from the former Yugoslavia, has been arrested in Spain, UN chief war crimes prosecutor Carla del Ponte said on Thursday.
His detention is a major boost for the international war crimes tribunal and brought immediate calls for extra efforts to catch the court's top fugitives, Bosnian Serb wartime leader Radovan Karadzic and his military chief Ratko Mladic.
It will also ease Croatia's path to joining the EU.
Gotovina was indicted in 2001 for alleged atrocities against rebel Serbs in a government offensive in August 1995 to retake rebel areas of Croatia, and has been in hiding since. "He was arrested this night in Spain ... he is now in detention, finally. He will be transferred to The Hague," Del Ponte said during a visit to Belgrade.
A Spanish court source said Gotovina was arrested at a hotel on Tenerife in the Canaries and will appear in a Madrid court on Thursday evening after being flown to a nearby military base.
He was likely to be handed over to the UN court in the Netherlands as soon as possible but would probably spend a few days in a Spanish jail first. A spokesman for the Hague court, set up to try war crimes from the break-up of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, said his transfer was being prepared.
Gotovina's arrest removes a key obstacle in Croatia's attempts to join the European Union, whose leaders were for a long time sceptical over how hard the government in Zagreb was trying to track down a man many Croats see as a national hero.
Croatia long claimed Gotovina, a French Foreign Legion veteran, fled abroad before his indictment was made public.
Gotovina is charged with responsibility for the murders of at least 150 Serbs by troops under his command in the aftermath of the "Operation Storm" offensive. He has denied any wrongdoing.
Until recently, he was so popular that posters with his picture, captioned "hero, not criminal", were popping up all over Croatia, showing the thick-set soldier in various poses. Gotovina's biography, published by a right-wing journalist under the title "Warrior, adventurer, general", portrayed him as a macho soldier who braved death and loved women.
True to his reputation, he married briefly in Colombia in 1980s, had an illegitimate child with a Croatian journalist in 1995 and married a Croatian army colonel two years later. Since he fled, he has reportedly been seen in Italy, Ireland, Bosnia and South Africa.
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