Police in Montenegro have arrested a local man accused of war crimes during the Kosovo conflict in the late 1990s, the state prosecutor said Thursday.
A brief statement said the man, named only by his initials V.Z., was arrested in the central city of Niksic and was "suspected of war crimes against the civilian population".
"The interrogation is ongoing and I cannot give more details," Andrijana Raznatovic, a spokeswoman for the prosecutor told AFP.
The 1998-99 conflict pitted ethnic Albanian guerrillas against forces of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia -- at that time consisting of Serbia and Montenegro -- in the former southern province of Kosovo.
Bekim Blakaj at Pristina's Humanitarian Law Centre, an NGO investigating war crimes, told AFP that the suspect in question was called Vlado Zmajevic.
"Our investigation enabled us to establish that a group of six volunteers in the ranks of the Yugoslav army raided the village of Zegra on March 29 and 30 (1999) and attacked the civilian population," Blakaj told AFP.
He said six people, two of them elderly, were killed in the raid in eastern Kosovo.
"It is interesting that Serbian police filed complaints with the military prosecutor against these volunteers immediately after the incident, and Zmajevic was first on the list of suspects," Blakaj added.
Montenegrin media said seven people were killed in the incident allegedly involving Zmajevic, 47.
The Kosovo war, which ended after a NATO bombing campaign against Serbia, left about 13,000 people dead and forced hundreds of thousands to flee their homes.
Kosovo subsequently became a protectorate under UN administration and in 2008 unilaterally declared its independence, which Serbia does not recognise.
