A former Bosnian Serb general wanted on genocide charges will be transferred to UN war crimes court in The Hague on Friday, a day after he was arrested, police said.
"Zdravko Tolimir is in Sarajevo, from where he will be transferred to The Hague at 1:00 pm (1100 GMT)," Bosnian Serb police official Gojko Vasic told journalists.
Tolimir was detained by local police in the eastern Bosnian town of Bratunac on Thursday after he had crossed the border from Serbia, said Vasic. He was then handed over to authorities of the UN court.
The 58-year-old, who also faces charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity over his role during Bosnia's 1992-1995 war, had serious health problems, he added without elaborating on the nature of the illness.
Before his departure to the Netherlands, doctors were to examine Tolimir and evaluate his health condition.
Since his arrest in a joint action mounted by Bosnian Serb and Serbian police, some local media outlets have reported that he was suffering from cancer.
Tolimir was in a "such a serious health condition that he could not travel," to The Hague-based International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) on Thursday, said police official Dragi Milosevic.
In a sealed indictment revealed in early 2005, Tolimir was charged by the ICTY for the Srebrenica massacre of 8,000 Muslim men and boys -- the worst atrocity in Europe since World War II.
The retired general was a close ally of the tribunal's most-wanted man, former Bosnian Serb military chief Ratko Mladic.
Meanwhile, the top international envoy to Bosnia praised the country's Serb police force for making their first ever arrest of a fugitive of the UN war crimes tribunal.
"The arrest is extremely significant," German diplomat Christian Schwarz-Schilling said in a statement.
Bosnian Serb police had previously been reluctant to mount such operations, although they have staged a series of raids in the past few months to hunt down war crimes suspects. Serbs generally consider the UN court as biased.
Since its 1992-1995 war, all of the war crimes fugitives to have been apprehended in Bosnia were captured in operations carried out by the NATO-led peacekeepers stationed in the country.
"This is a very positive development," NATO spokesman James Appathurai said Friday.
"First because it demonstrates cooperation with the tribunal -- and that is the obligation of every government in the region -- and second because this is someone charged with extremely grave crimes and those charges need to be answered."
European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana called Friday for the capture of all remaining war crimes indictees in the Balkans.
Also noting that it was the first time Bosnian Serb police had been involved in the capture of an indictee, Solana said in a statement that full cooperation with the ICTY "is an international obligation that must be met."
The capture of Tolimir means that only five of the 161 people to have been indicted by the ICTY over the conflicts that shattered the former communist Yugoslav in the 1990s remain at large.
Mladic, 64, is widely believed to be hiding in Serbia, while little is known about the whereabouts of his 61-year-old political leader, Radovan Karadzic, who is thought to move between Montenegro and Serb-controlled parts of Bosnia.
The other war crimes suspects still on the run from the Hague are: former Karadzic aide Stojan Zupljanin, 55; former Croatian Serb official Goran Hadzic, 48; and a former Serb police commander in Kosovo, Vlastimir Djordjevic, 58.
Zupljanin is believed to be hiding in Bosnia's Serb entity, Hadzic in Serbia proper, and Djordjevic in Russia.
