Europe

Europe

Croatian Serb leader Goran Hadzic extradited to The Hague

22 July 2011 16:18 (UTC +04:00)

A police motorcade, sirens blaring, was earlier seen leaving the Belgrade jail where Mr Hadzic was being held.

Before being taken to the airport, Mr Hadzic, 52, was allowed to see his sick mother in northern Serbia.

Mr Hadzic led Serb separatist forces during Croatia’s 1991-1995 war and was arrested on Wednesday after seven years on the run.

The plane carrying Mr Hadzic has now landed in Rotterdam.

Mr Hadzic was a central figure in the self-proclaimed Serb republic of Krajina in 1992-1993, leading the campaign to block Croatia’s independence from Yugoslavia.

He faces 14 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity, including persecution, extermination and torture.

He is held responsible for the massacre of almost 300 men in Vukovar in 1991 by Croatian Serb troops and for the deportation of 20,000 people from the town after it was captured.

After the war, Mr Hadzic lived openly in the northern Serbian city of Novi Sad until 2004, when the Hague War Crimes Tribunal indicted him and he disappeared.