THE ARREST of the Bosnian Serb commander Ratko Mladic for war crimes has been hailed as ‘an outstanding day’ for the troubled Balkan region by a Dorset police officer who helped investigate mass graves and summary executions in the country.

Former Detective Superintendent Tony Nott led the British forensic team for two months, witnessing, in his words, ‘the very worst humans can do’ and exhuming up to 12 murdered corpses per day.

“The vast number of people were killed by multiple gunshot wounds so they were shot in a firing squad manner,” he said. “Others were shot, if I can put it like this, in a slow manner; in the groin, left and right in the chest, in the shape of the cross. It was a wicked thing.”

He lived in Sarajevo for a year and has heard the damning intercept evidence of Mladic ordering his commander in the mountains to shell the Muslim part of the city.

“He said there were not many Serbs living in that area and instructed the commander to keep shelling until he ordered him to stop, and to drive them to the edge of madness,” said Mr Nott. That’s recorded and it’s an intercept which the tribunal at The Hague will hear.”

He won’t be giving evidence personally because depositions of his team’s work have already been made in the Kosovo investigations and much of the work was done through the international criminal tribunal.

He also praised the British police work in the region and the professionalism of the officers involved in the exhumations.

“It’s important for the victims’ families that we were able to prove how they died, to get the evidence forensically, rather than leave it to rumour and speculation,” he said.

Valuable work in the region has also been done by the respected team run by former Bournemouth University academic Professor Margaret Cox, who also excavated massacre sites in Kosovo. What she saw there inspired the creation of Inforce, the world’s first international centre of excellence for the investigation of genocide.

Tony Nott now hopes that news of Mladic’s apprehending will have a healing effect. “I listened to the former prime minister of Bosnia Herzegovina on the news and he said something that was very important,” said Mr Nott. “He said that Serbia was led by a bunch of criminals and what happens when criminals do this is that we see the besmirching of the good name of many people in the Balkans, including the Serbs.”