War crimes convict Stankovic escapes from BiH prison

FOCA, Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) — Bosnian Serb convict Radovan Stankovic, sentenced to 20 years for war crimes, escaped from custody in the eastern Bosnian town of Foca on Friday (May 25th).
Stankovic managed to escape while being transported from the prison to a clinic, where he was to see a dentist. Accomplices drove off with him, prompting a manhunt involving Republika Srpska police, the BiH State Investigation and Protection Agency and the State Border Service. Nine guards who were escorting Stankovic have been fired. Charged with crimes in Foca in 1992, including the rape of Bosniak women, Stankovic was the first defendant whose case was transferred in 2005 from the UN tribunal to the BiH judiciary for processing. Security around those who testified against him has been stepped up.
In other news, forensic experts announced on Friday that they had discovered two new mass graves in BiH. The first, in Sokolac, near Sarajevo, held the remains of 28 Croat and Muslim civilians who had been rounded up by Serbs in a suburb of the capital. The second grave, near Prijedor, contained the bodies of six Muslim inmates of a nearby Serb detention camp. (Dnevni Avaz, Nezavisne Novine – 27/05/07; Reuters, AP, AFP, PBS BiH – 25/05/07)