Bosnian war crimes suspect arrested

French police have arrested a Bosnian Serb former soldier suspected of detaining civilians inside a house and then setting it on fire, killing 59 people during Bosnia's 1992-1995 war.

Bosnian officials have requested Radomir Susnjar's extradition following his arrest, the war crimes prosecutor's office said in a statement on Friday.

Susnjar is suspected of taking part in the June 1992 "killing of 59 Muslim civilians, among them women and children", in the eastern town of Visegrad.

Some 66 civilians were locked in a house that was later set ablaze. Only seven survived.

The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia last year sentenced two Bosnian Serb paramilitaries for the same war crime.

Milan Lukic was sentenced to life imprisonment, while his brother Sredoje Lukic was sentenced to 27 years for taking part in the crime, described by the court as one of the "worst acts of inhumanity that one person may inflict on others".

Between April and June 1992, at the start of the Bosnian war, Serb forces killed more than 1500 civilians in Visegrad and its surroundings, according to data collected by the Bosnian Institute for Missing Persons.

More than 100,000 people were killed during the Bosnian war, while some two million - almost half the country's population - fled their homes.