Serbs Arrest Alleged Assassin

The sniper suspected of killing Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic two weeks ago has been arrested, the slain premier's successor said Tuesday.

Prime Minister Zoran Zivkovic identified the suspect in custody as Zvezdan Jovanovic, a former deputy commander of an elite unit of police troops under former President Slobodan Milosevic.

Djindjic, Serbia's leading pro-Western politician, was killed by a sniper March 12 as he stepped out of an armored car in front of government headquarters in downtown Belgrade.

Zivkovic said police found a German-made sniper rifle suspected of being the murder weapon.

Another man, identified as Sasa Pejakovic, was arrested for allegedly aiding the sniper during the killing, he said.

Djindjic made enemies by declaring war on organized crime, which flourished in Serbia under Milosevic's rule. He also angered some Serbs by pledging to arrest war-crimes suspects wanted by the U.N. tribunal in The Hague, Netherlands, where Milosevic now is being tried. Djindjic played a crucial role in Milosevic's extradition.

Authorities accused an organized crime ring known as the Zemun Clan, a network of mobsters, paramilitary and former security service figures linked to remnants of Milosevic's regime, of plotting the slaying and carrying it out. They imposed a state of emergency, launching a major hunt for leading crime figures and their associates in the judiciary, police and other state services.

During the hunt, investigators have uncovered "illegal jails" in several summer houses in the north of the country where "mobsters tortured kidnapped people," a senior police official told The Associated Press.

"We discovered a wide array of military weaponry, handcuffs and chains there," he said.

Milosevic's regime sent the crime figures to fight in notorious paramilitary units in the 1990s Balkan wars. After the conflicts, he gave them a free hand to run lucrative drug trafficking operations, authorities say.

Nearly 400 criminal charges have been filed against underworld figures detained after Djindjic's assassination, police said Monday.

More than 1,000 suspects remain in custody and likely will face criminal proceedings in the weeks to come, Dragan Sutanovac, head of the Serbian parliament's Security and Defense Board, told independent B-92 radio.