Bosnian Serb war crimes suspect Dragan Zelenovic pleaded "not guilty" to multiple charges of rape and torture during the Bosnian war at the UN war crimes tribunal in the Hague today.
Zelenovic arrived in The Netherlands to face trial last month after tribunal chief prosecutor Carla del Ponte complained that Russian authorities who arrested Zelenovic last year had dragged their feet on the case.
The former policeman (45) was charged in 1996 for atrocities committed against non-Serbs in his native Foca region, southeast of Sarajevo, during the 1992-95 Bosnian war.
After Serb forces took control of Foca, whose population at the time was 52 per cent Muslim and 45 per cent Serb, they began to arrest and unlawfully detain thousands of Muslim and Croats.
Men and women were separated, and many of the detained women were subjected to humiliating treatment, brutal beatings and sexual assaults.
Zelenovic is accused of raping and sexually assaulting women, and of gang-raping detainees, including a 15-year-old girl in the Buk Bijela detention centre in July 1992.
He was arrested last August in the Khanti-Mansiisk autonomous district of western Siberia where Russian media said he had been working on construction sites under an assumed name.
Six other former Bosnian Serb officers went on trial today on charges of genocide over the 1995 Srebrenica massacre of more than 7,000 Muslim men and boys.