Africa
Genocide suspect’s look-alike freed in Kenya
Igor Majeski sits in the courtyard of the Mombasa port police station on the Kenyan coast, March 27, 2009, after his arrest on suspicion of being a war criminal from the former Yugoslavia. Interpol said in a statement on Friday that Majeski, who had run a water sports business for years north of the Indian Ocean coast city of Mombasa, is not the fugitive Bosnian Serb military commander Ratko Mladic after a series of checks, including checks against Interpol's fingerprint database. PHOTO/ REUTERS
MOMBASA, Saturday
Kenyan police have released a tourism operator suspected of being fugitive Bosnian-Serb military commander Ratko Mladic.
Mr Igor Majeski who had run a water sports business for years near Mombasa was seized on Thursday on suspicion of war crimes in former Yugoslavia.
Colleagues at Whitesands Hotel, where he operated, were astonished at the detention of Mr Majeski, a Croatian in his 60s who had lived in Kenya for about two decades.
When international police body Interpol said fingerprints and other checks confirmed he was not Mladic, 67, police freed him without a charge from custody in Mombasa.
In a statement concluding the saga, police explained that their subject “bears very close resemblance” to Mladic.
But “forensic investigators, through Interpol, have conclusively established that the person arrested is not Mr Ratko Mladic, but a Croatian national holding a valid passport and work permit.
“He is running a legal tourism business in Kenya’s South Coast.”
Mr Mladic, who has been indicted for genocide, is one of two suspects on the run from the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague.
The other is Croatian Serb leader Goran Hadzic.
RSS