THE HAGUE - A former Bosnian Serb army officer charged with genocide over the 1995 Srebrenica massacre turned himself in to the UN war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia here on Thursday, a tribunal spokesman said.
Drago Nikolic, who faces charges of genocide, has been transferred to the tribunal's detention centre. In the coming days he will appear in court for the first time to enter a plea to the charges against him.
Nikolic, 47, has been indicted for genocide or complicity in genocide and crimes against humanity and war crimes over the massacre by Bosnian Serb forces of some 8,000 Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica in July 1995.
The massacre is considered the worst single atrocity in Europe since the end of World War II. It was one of the bloodiest incidents in the 1992-95 war in Bosnia which left over 200,000 people dead.
The alleged architects of the killings, former Bosnian Serb leaders Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, remain at large.
At the time of the massacre Nikolic was the chief of security of the Zvornik Brigade of the Bosnian Serb army, one of the brigades which led the attack on the UN protected Muslim enclave in eastern Bosnia.
He is the ninth war crimes suspect from Serbia to have voluntarily surrendered to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) since November, under the cooperation strategy of the Serbian government in Belgrade.
The Serbian government said Thursday that it would give guarantees for Nikolic to be released pending the start of the trial, as well as legal and financial aid.
Belgrade is hoping to receive a positive report from the European Union later this month on joining the bloc.
But its progress toward EU and NATO membership is being jeopardised by its failure to arrest top Serb war crimes suspects Karadzic and Mladic, who are allegedly hiding somewhere in the former Yugoslavia.
03/17/2005 20:56 GMT