Prosecutors for an international tribunal investigating war crimes committed during Kosovo's 1990s independence war have arrested their first suspect, the prosecutor's office said Thursday.
Salih Mustafa, a former senior commander in the rebel Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), is being transferred to a detention centre at the court based in The Hague called the Kosovo Specialist Chambers.
Mustafa was arrested Thursday in Kosovo and will appear before a judge at the KSC "without undue delay", the prosecutor's office said in a statement.
The exact charges against Mustafa are not yet known and "only need to be made public when the accused first appears in court," a spokesman for the prosecutor's office, Christopher Bennett, told AFP.
The arrest comes months after the court indicted Kosovo President Hashim Thaci for his alleged role in nearly 100 murders during the 1998-89 conflict while he led the KLA.
Thaci was questioned but not formally arrested.
Mustafa, currently a civil staff officer in the defence ministry, was a KLA member known to have operated in north Kosovo.
Afterwards he led the intelligence service in the Kosovo Security Force, a lightly armed emergency force that emerged from the demilitarised KLA.
The conflict, which cost some 13,000 lives, pitted ethnic Albanian KLA guerrillas seeking independence for the southern Serbian province of Kosovo against Serbia's forces.
The Serbs withdrew after an 11-week NATO bombing campaign but tensions remain to this day, with the the US and most of the West recognising Kosovo, while Belgrade and its allies Russia and China do not.
The EU-backed tribunal was established in 2015 to investigate alleged war crimes by the KLA.