Bosnian police arrested two Bosnian Serb wartime commanders suspected of taking part in genocide against Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica in July 1995.

The State Protection and Investigative Agency arrested Momir Pelemis (59) and Slavko Peric (61) in the eastern town of Zvornik, where they had served as the Zvornik brigade deputy commander and an assistant commander. The suspects will be handed over to the Bosnian war crimes court's prosecutor's office, which had ordered their arrest.

"The suspects will be brought to the Prosecutor's office due to the grounded suspicion that they committed the criminal offence of genocide by participating in the apprehension and execution of 1,700 Bosniak men from the Srebrenica enclave," the prosecutor's office said in a statement. The Bosnian court has put 22 Bosnian Serbs on trial over Srebrenica. Ten have been jailed, four acquitted and eight are still being tried. The Bosnian war crimes court will issue verdicts for four of them on Thursday.

Srebrenica 1995
Bosnian Serb forces, commanded by General Ratko Mladic, killed around 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys in Srenrenica in 1995. Most were killed while trying to escape through the woods, either shot down immediately or arrested and brought to warehouses or schools from where they were taken to places of execution. They were buried in mass graves which are still being exhumed. Forensic experts are working on two such graves in the village of Kamenica, where some 10 burial sites have been found.

The Zvornik brigade was one of 13 brigades of the Bosnian Serb army that comprised the Drina corps, commanded by General Radislav Krstic, who was jailed for 35 years by the UN International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague over the Srebrenica genocide.

The Hague war crimes court has sentenced 7 Bosnian Serbs for the Srebrenica bloodshed. Nine more are on trial, and Mladic, seen as the mastermind of the massacre, is on the run 13 years after he was indicted.

Written by: International Justice Desk