A quiet Derby suburb is the location of a Serbian war crimes suspect wanted for abusing civilians during the Balkans war.
As he awaits extradition hearings on July 21, electrician Milenko Maric, 62, a father of three, is required to wear an electronic ankle tag and spend each night in his own house.
He resides in a humble council home, and his ill wife often drives the kids to the neighbourhood primary school.
He and his wife are private individuals who don’t speak much English, but they are totally pleasant, a stunned neighbour told The Mirror. She works at the neighbourhood school, and he has performed odd jobs as an electrician.
You would never guess that he is wanted for war crimes, the speaker said.
Maric, who arrived in the UK more than 20 years ago as an asylum seeker, is accused of being a member of a brutal militia that attacked non-ethnic Serbs in 1991 at the height of the Yugoslavian war.
According to prosecutors in his native country, the assaults allegedly happened in a prison in August and September 1991 after the victims had been brought there from their homes.
One victim, Joha, claims that Maric and two other militia members beat him “on multiple times” with electrified rubber truncheons, causing damage to “his entire body.”
Joha also claims that the militia broke into his house and stole money, a watch, a gold ring, and a gold necklace.
According to court documents, MM [Milenko Maric] assaulted and expelled a number of residents of non-Serbian ethnicity from the Baranya region while serving as a member of the Secretariat for International Affairs of Manastir.
During the Croatian War of Independence, which lasted from 1991 to 1995, severe fighting took place in the Baranya region, which is now divided between Hungary and Croatia. The biggest city of Baranya, Osijek, alone saw 1,700 casualties.
From 1991 to 1995, it was under the authority of Serbian paramilitaries, who committed crimes against the non-Serb populace until it was handed back to the Croats in 1998 after a transfer by UN soldiers.
Following the conflict, Croat authorities sought out those allegedly responsible for the atrocities, and in 1997 a wanted poster was published for Maric. In 2001, Croat officials compiled a list of 50 people they believed to be war criminals.
The Osijek public prosecutor’s office issued an arrest warrant for the father-of-three the following year for crimes against humanity.
Maric had already departed at this point, landing in the UK where he was granted permission to stay indefinitely.
But determined war crime investigators located him at his Derby house and had him detained in June 2015. His extradition to Croatia was ordered by a Westminster magistrate, and Amber Rudd, the Home Secretary at the time, concurred.
He vehemently refutes the accusations made against him and declares to The Mirror, “I am innocent.” I’ve been falsely accused. I don’t enjoy doing anything without my attorney.
I just want to say that I’m innocent; I don’t want to say anything else.
In a bizarre turn of events, he was later judged not guilty in absentia in Croatia, but astonishingly the country’s Supreme Court reversed the decision, leading to the issuance of a fresh international arrest warrant.
He was detained once again by National Extradition Unit officers in March of last year, and a full hearing is scheduled for July 21 at Westminster magistrates court.
The Balkan Wars were a multi-phase civil war that tore apart Yugoslavia along ethnic lines between 1991 and 2001.
According to the International Center for Transitional Justice, the fighting resulted in the genocide and ethnic cleansing of an estimated 140,000 people.
Maric can anticipate doing any jail time in a Croatian facility, while several Serb war criminals are now serving time in British facilities.
The remainder of Radovan Karadzic’s prison sentence will be served in the UK after he was found guilty of genocide by the International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague, Holland.
His involvement in the 1995 massacre of more than 7,000 Muslim men, boys, and children at Srebrenica led to his conviction for genocide.
In the past, five men who had been found guilty of war crimes by the tribunals in the former Yugoslavia were imprisoned in British high-security facilities.
One of them was former Bosnian-Serb commander Radislav Krstic, who was hacked in the throat in Wakefield Prison in 2010 by Muslim inmates (later transferred to a Polish prison).