France hands war crimes suspect to Bosnia

SARAJEVO

France has extradited to Bosnia a former ethnic Serb solider accused of taking part in the burning alive of more than 50 Muslim civilians during the country’s 1990s war, prosecutors said on June 24.

Radomir Susnjar, 62, known also as “Lalco,” was identified as living in France by an investigation by Bosnian prosecutors.

He was arrested in France in 2014 and released under court supervision before being arrested again earlier this month in Seine-Saint-Denis, a region north of Paris.

A Bosnian court charged him in 2017 with taking part in the incident in which members of Bosnian Serb military and paramilitary forces held Muslim civilians inside a house in Visegrad in eastern Bosnia, the statement said.

“The house was then set on fire, while Susnjar and others were shooting at it to prevent civilians from fleeing.”

Only a few people escaped with their lives. The victims included women, children and elderly people.

The fire was one of a number of atrocities during the Bosnian war for which two Bosnian Serb former paramilitaries were sentenced by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY).

In 2012, the ICTY upheld Milan Lukic’s life sentence and reduced his cousin Sredoje Lukic’s sentence to 27 years in jail.