Croatia-born British citizen charged with war crimes

By JERUSALEM POST STAFF
A British citizen of Croatian Serb origin was charged Thursday with war crimes on suspicion that he participated in the execution of Croat prisoners of war during the 1991 Serb-Croat conflict. Milorad Pejic, who emigrated to Britain in the late 1990s where he worked as a locksmith, was arrested March 19 at Belgrade airport as he planned to take a flight to London. Serbia's war crimes prosecutors said in a statement that Pejic, 39, was charged, along with 16 other Croatian Serb former paramilitary fighters, with the "execution" of 200 Croats at a pig farm in eastern Croatia after the fall of the city of Vukovar, in November 1991. The execution-style killings are considered one of the most brutal crimes of the Croatian war that began after the breakup of the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s.