Croatia's former PM arrested as screw is turned on graft

• Ivo Sanader fled just before warrant took effect Picture: Nikola Solic

An official at the Austrian Federal Office of Criminal Investigations said Sanader was arrested on the motorway connecting the provinces of Salzburg and Carinthia.

He was taken to the detention facilities of the Salzburg provincial court, said the official.

In a statement, Croatian police spokesman Krunoslav Borovec said Austrian police informed them that Sanader had been arrested at 3:50pm "in the Salzburg area".

Sanader, who abruptly resigned as prime minister 17 months ago, left Croatia on Thursday morning, when it became clear that prosecutors wanted to investigate him for allegedly conspiring to commit crimes and abuse of office.

Once hailed at home and abroad for uprooting the nationalism that reigned in Croatia in the 1990s and for making it pro-Western, Sanader is now under lock and key. Biographical information and his photo appeared on Croatian police and Interpol lists of wanted persons yesterday, and police searched his home.

He has a company in Austria and has visited the United States to speak at Columbia University's Harriman Institute, which focuses on countries of the former Soviet Union, east central Europe and the Balkans.

Sanader - the highest-ranking official to be charged with a crime since Croatia became independent in 1991 - was last seen driving into neighbouring Slovenia on Thursday morning. Repeated efforts to reach him on his mobile phone were unsuccessful.

The Croatian parliament lifted Sanader's immunity from prosecution on Thursday afternoon.

Croatia's Office for Suppression of Organised Crime and Corruption said Sanader is suspected of conspiring to commit crimes and abuse of office. It did not disclose details of the ongoing investigation, but at its request Zagreb district court ordered Sanader's 30-day detention.

Several former government officials and businessmen, including Sanader's closest allies as prime minister, have been jailed as Sanader's successor, Prime Minister Jadranka Kosor, works to fight high-level corruption - a key condition for Croatia's entry into the European Union. Croatia hopes to join the bloc in 2012.

Croatian media have been speculating for months that Sanader was under investigation in Kosor's anti-graft crackdown. The opposition claims that graft was widespread in his government and that he either condoned or led it.

According to a US cable published by Wikileaks, chief state prosecutor Mladen Bajic told the US embassy in Zagreb in January 2010 that there are several ongoing corruption cases targeting Sanader and that at least one case could lead to his indictment.

Bajic referred to one case in which Sanader allegedly arranged a bank loan for a neighbour in the 1990s in return for an 800,000-German mark kickback.

It also quoted Bajic as saying that, although some cases against Sanader may seem minor, "Al Capone was brought down for tax evasion rather than for his more notorious activities".

Sanader quit as the prime minister at the middle of his second term, saying only that he had decided to leave politics. Kosor later removed him from her governing conservative Croatian Democratic Union, but he returned to parliament as an independent lawmaker last month.

Meanwhile, police said a former senior member of Croatia's ruling party was detained yesterday as part of a war crimes investigation, about two decades after media implicated him in some of the most brutal atrocities against Serbs.

Police did not identify the suspect in line with privacy laws, but state-run Croatian television showed Tomislav Mercep being taken into a police station yesterday.

Mercep also was briefly an interior ministry official during the 1991 Serbo-Croat war.

Police said Mercep was suspected of alleged war crimes against civilians committed from October through December 1991 in the capital, Zagreb, and at a field near the central Croatian town of Pakrac.