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“Stankovic has been arrested today (Saturday, January 21) at 15.45 by members of the Foca Police station, after a citizen tip, that the fugitive was hiding in a family apartment”, confirmed Mirna Soja, spokesperson of the Republika Srpska police.
Stankovic has been interrogated and should be sent to the Foca penal facility in the evening. He escaped the Foca Penal and Correctional Facility on May 25, 2007, when he was being taken to the Faculty of Dentistry for a tooth x-ray.
Soja said that Stankovic tried to resist and flee, but police officers managed to seize him near the apartment in which he was staying.
The Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina found Stankovic guilty, that as a former member of the Miljevina Battalion with the Foca Tactical Brigade of the Republika Srpska Army, VRS, he took part in, abeted and assisted the capture, torture, rape and murder of non-Serb civilians in the Foca area from April 1992 to February 1993.
Radovan Stankovic was the first war-crimes indictee referred by the Hague Tribunal to the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina for further processing. Following the trial against him, a first instance verdict was pronounced, sentencing Stankovic to 20 years in prison.
The State Court had found Ranko Stankovic guilty of assisting the escape of his brother Radovan Stankovic and sentenced him to two years imprisonment.
By a decision of the Appeals chamber, a first instance verdict was revoked by which seven staff members of the Penal and Correctional Facility in Foca were freed of having helped convict Radovan Stankovic escape from prison and a retrial was ordered.
Radovan Stankovic was found guilty by the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina of having been one of the organisers and supervisors of the so-called “Karaman House”, which served as a prison for women, and which was called the “Public House” by the Serbian soldiers.
According to the verdict, nine girls and women, aged between 12 and 24, were held in “Karaman house” from April to October in 1992. They were all, according to the Court, physically and psychologically abused and raped. Stankovic was found guilty of raping three women.
After escaping prison, there were doubts that Stankovic was in Serbia, because he has a Serbian passport, which he received while being detained in The Hague.
