‘Female Monster’ arrested for war crimes in Bosnia

A BOSNIAN Serb accused of race crimes so brutal her victims called her the “Female Monster” has been arrested.

Monika Ilic’s once childlike appearance is alleged to have hid a cruel streak which she used to the full during the Bosnian war between 1992 and 1995.

Ilic was 18 when she married Goran Jelisic, a convicted murderer and concentration camp torturer.

The two allegedly committed crimes against imprisoned non-Serbs in Brcko.

Jelisic, who called himself the “Serb Adolf”, was sentenced in 2001 to 40 years in jail by the UN war crimes tribunal.

Ilic evaded justice for years, apparently living in Serbia under a false name for a time.

Following an international warrant, police tracked her down in Prijedor, Bosnia, where her boyfriend, Nebojsa Stojanov, lives.

She joins just a handful of women who have been accused of or stood trial for war crimes in Bosnia.

The most prominent one — and the only former resident of the famous Sheveningen detention unit attached to the UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague — is a former member of the wartime Bosnian Serb leadership, Biljana Plavsic.

As one of the creators of the Serb ministate in Bosnia during the war, she was sentenced by the tribunal in 2003 of persecution, a crime against humanity, as part of an ethnic cleansing campaign to drive Bosniaks and Croats out of Serb-controlled areas of Bosnia.

Plavsic was released after serving two thirds of her 11-year sentence and has settled in Belgrade.

A few years ago Ilic’s brother, Konstantin Simonovic, was sentenced to six years for crimes committed as commander of the notorious camp “Luka” where both Ilic and Jelisic are alleged to have operated.

Several witnesses have said Bosnian Ilic looked like a little girl but was notoriously cruel.