British Defence Secretary George Robertson: efforts to catch war criminals stepped up (2'43")

Correspondents say the message is clearly directed at the former Bosnian Serb President, Radovan Karadzic, who is high on the list of those wanted by the International Tribunal at the Hague.

The two men detained on Wednesday are Mladin Radic and Miroslav Kvocka, both senior officers at the Omarska detention camp in northern Bosnia, where Muslims and Croats were allegedly tortured and killed in the early years of the 1992-1995 Bosnian conflict.

They have been flown to The Hague in the Netherlands, where they are expected to appear before the tribunal next week.

Omarska camp inmates were mainly Muslims and Croats

The two were arrested by British troops serving in a contingent of the SFOR peacekeeping force, which controls the north-western Bosnian region where a large number of alleged war criminals are still at large.

SFOR officials say the suspects put up some resistance, but nobody was injured during the operation.

It was also British forces that killed one suspect and captured another in Prijador in July 1997 in an operation that marked the beginning of a new, more aggressive SFOR policy.

US State Department representative, James Rubin: "No place to run and no place to hide" (20")

Since then, there have been other arrests, and a number of Bosnian-Serb suspects have handed themselves in.

A BBC correspondent in the region, Jacky Rowland, said that SFOR is waging psychological warfare on suspected war criminals by carrying out large military exercises and inspections close to places where they are believed to be in hiding.

Of 74 people indicted by the court in The Hague for war crimes in connection with the Bosnian war, more than 30 are now in custody, including the two most recent detainees.

The two most prominent indicted suspects, former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic and his military commander, Ratko Mladic, both remain at large.

SFOR troops skirted Dr Karadzic's home in the Serb nationalist stronghold of Pale in early April in what was ostensibly an inspection of special police units.