Bosnian Serbs deported by US are indicted for war-crimes

A December 2004 law – the Anti-Atrocity Alien Deportation Act – also gave the Justice Department's Office of Special Investigations powers to go after naturalized US citizens suspected of crimes committed before they entered the country. Federal investigators had previously tracked only Nazi-era suspects to prevent them from entering the US.

"I think the United States prides itself on being a refuge for people running away from persecution, and some of these human rights violators will come to the United States seeking the same refuge as their victims," Mr. Keegan says. "And that's not hard to believe, since most of them were at the site where the atrocities were committed, so they know the details. So when they're going through their interview, it's possible for them to describe the scene and be credible."

Operation No Safe Haven will continue indefinitely, Keegan says. It also appears to be bringing in more Srebrenica suspects than any other attempts. The Hague tribunal, for example, has been able to try only seven high-ranking Bosnian Serb military and police officers in a trial that began in July, because several of the men had been brought in under so-called "voluntary surrenders." The tribunal's two most-wanted men – Bosnian Serb political and military heads Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic – remain fugitives.

Blagojevic, Bozic, and two others who were arrested in Bosnia, are the latest defendants in Bosnia's national war-crimes chamber – established in 2005 to take on mid- and lower-level ranking suspects – to be charged with alleged crimes at Srebrenica. Eleven others have been on trial for genocide since May, a trial that Damir Petrovic, a public-information lawyer at Bosnia's state court where the war-crimes chamber is housed,called "the largest criminal case in Europe right now."

A lawyer for Nedjo Ikonic, a Bosnian Serb arrested outside Milwaukee earlier this month who pleaded not guilty this week to making false statements, says that US officials are targeting too widely, and that the sting is sparking fears among the Serbian diaspora in the US.

"There's one lady in Salt Lake City who was a cook paid by the Republika Srpska Army. That's stretching the party to a crime concept. It seems like the [Bosnian] government wants to investigate every one of them," says Nikola Kostich, senior partner at the Milwaukee law firm Kostich, LeBell, Dobroski, & Morgan. Mr. Kostich defended several prominent Serb suspects in The Hague and has advised many of those arrested in the past 24 months.

"I've also given a lot of advice to people who have not been charged – people who have called me because they're not sleeping well, and they think there's going to be a knock on the door in the night, and they don't know what to do," he says.

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