Bosnian police arrested Wednesday three ethnic Serbs, including a brigade commander during the country's civil war, for allegedly participating in the Srebrenica massacre of 8,000 Muslims in 1995, prosecutors said.
Mile Kosoric, 64, the former commander, and two members of his brigade, including the head of a special unit, were arrested in the eastern areas of Vlasenica and Han Pijesak.
"The suspects are being investigated over war crimes and aiding the genocide," the Bosnian prosecutor's office said.
In November, UN judges in The Hague sentenced wartime Bosnian Serb military chief Ratko Mladic to life in jail for the genocide at Srebrenica, along with other war crimes.
About 8,000 Muslim men and boys were slaughtered at the hands of Mladic's forces in the eastern Bosnian enclave in July 1995.
A total of 100,000 people were killed in Bosnia's 1992-1995 war, which pitched Muslims, Serbs and Croats against one another as Yugoslavia fell apart.
The latest investigation concerns the execution of "at least 30" Muslim civilians who were separated from a convoy of refugees leaving Srebrenica after it was captured by Serb forces, the prosecutors said.
They were first locked up in a school and then taken away to be killed.
So far, the remains of 6,733 victims of the Srebrenica massacre have been identified and buried, according to Bosnia's Missing Persons Institute.
In an interview with AFP in October, a month before the verdict against Mladic was announced, Kosoric defended his former commander and claimed he had not been aware of the massacre at Srebrenica.
"Most of my colleagues, commanders, ended in prison and some have already gone out. I was also interrogated by the Bosnian justice," but "nobody has ever ordered me to commit crimes, I have never seen nor heard Mladic ordering that," Kosoric said in Han Pijesak, where he lived.
"I only think that had we not defended ourselves, we would not exist any more," he said.