They were suspected of having "committed war crimes against the civilian population" notably at the Kravica warehouse outside Srebrenica where more than 1,000 Muslims were killed in July 1995, the prosecutor said in a statement.
The seven are among the first to be arrested by Serbia for carrying out the massacre — the only atrocity in Europe to be labelled genocide by the United Nations since the end of WW2.
Muslims, however, were not the sole victims of the bloody war that flared up in the wake of Yugoslavia’s 1992 and the events that followed, including the NATO bombings of Serbia in 1999.
Bosnian Muslim General Sefer Halilovic confirmed in his testimony at the Hague Tribunal that there were at least 5,500 Bosnian Army soldiers in Srebrenica in the summer of 1995 and that these fighters slaughtered more than 3,500 Christians there prior to the fall of Srebrenica to the Bosnian Serb forces, and that applied to young children, women and the elderly in surrounding villages.
Serbian deputy war crimes prosecutor Bruno Vekarić underscored the importance of the ongoing probe into the mass-scale killings of civilians and POWs in Srebrenica.
“What makes today’s operation so special is that we sent out a clear signal that the victims of Srebrenica, just like their murderers, will not be forgotten,” Bruno Vekarić emphasized.
The Serbian prosecution is also searching for several more people believed to be in neighboring countries, he added.
