The chief UN war crimes prosecutor today said that the top Croatian war crimes fugitive, Gen. Ante Gotovina, had been arrested in Spain’s Canary Islands after four years on the run.

Croatia has been under intense pressure from the European Union to arrest Gotovina and turn him over to the UN war crimes tribunal for trial on charges he masterminded the killing of at least 150 Serbs and the expulsion of some 150,000 others during Croatia’s bitter 1991-1995 war.

Gotovina is regarded as a hero by many in Croatia, and the government’s failure to arrest him had blocked Croatia’s EU membership talks for years.

EU negotiations finally began in October, after UN prosecutor Carla Del Ponte said the country was co-operating with the tribunal.

In Belgrade today, Del Ponte announced, “Ante Gotovina was arrested in Spain. He’s now in detention.”

Del Ponte said Gotovina, 50, would soon be transferred from the Canary Islands to a detention unit at the tribunal in The Hague, Netherlands.

Gotovina, the most-wanted Croatian war crimes suspect, has been at large since the tribunal accused him in 2001 of the wartime atrocities.

The Hague indictment alleges that Gotovina “participated in a joint criminal enterprise, the common purpose of which was the forcible and permanent removal of the (Croatian) Serb population ... including by the plunder, damage or outright destruction of property of the Serb population, so as to discourage or prevent members of that population from returning to their homes and resuming habitation.”

Del Ponte thanked the Spanish and Croatian authorities for the arrest.

Nato Secretary-General Jaap De Hoop Scheffer said in Brussels that “the arrest of Gotovina is good news for the world. ... I think it’s also good news for Croatia.”

Del Ponte said that following Gotovina’s arrest, she was expecting the other two top war crimes suspects, wartime Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic and Gen. Ratko Mladic, to be arrested.

“I’m expecting now Mladic and Karadzic,” Del Ponte said.

The two, who are believed to be hiding in Serbia or in the Serb-controlled half of Bosnia, were charged by the tribunal for allegedly orchestrating the 1995 massacre of 8,000 Muslim boys and men from Srebrenica – Europe’s worst carnage since the Second World War – and for laying a 3-year siege to the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo during Bosnia’s 1992-95 war.