By Beti Bilandzic BELGRADE, May 30 (Reuters) - Serbia's war crimes prosecutor has opened an investigation against 12 Serbs suspected of killing 70 civilians in the early months of Croatia's 1991-95 war, a spokesman said on Wednesday. The prosecutor's spokesman said the suspects -- former soldiers, members of a Serb paramilitary group and members of a local militia group in the east of Croatia -- were in custody, and more arrests could follow. They are held in connection with crimes in the village of Lovas near the Serb border in late 1991, when Croatian Serbs backed by the Yugoslav army and Serb paramilitaries seized the area from Croatia, which had declared independence a few months before. In the first incident on Oct. 10, 1991 the Serb side attacked and captured Lovas killing 22 civilians. "A day later they tortured and murdered 12 civilians they had taken prisoner the previous day and killed 11 others in their houses," said spokesman Bruno Vekaric. A week later they made 22 people walk over a minefield. "They all died," Vekaric said. More killings in the days that followed brought the total number of victims to 70. The prosecutor's office said they had been gathering evidence on the case for two years in cooperation with Croatian authorities. An official indictment followed by a trial could be expected in three to six months. Croatia has already charged 17 people, mostly ethnic Serbs for killing, torturing and expelling civilians in Lovas during the war. Only one of them is on the dock while the rest are being tried in absentia. Some of the people charged in the Croatia trial are believed to be in the newly arrested group of 12 suspects. But they would be tried in Serbia, partly because Serbia and Croatia have no mutual extradition agreement, and partly because the countries are under pressure from the West to face up to their war crimes past at home. Lovas is near the eastern Croatian town of Vukovar, which was almost destroyed in the worst fighting of that war. Vukovar was the scene of the most notorious massacre during the Croatian war: during a three-month siege in late 1991, Serb forces killed more than 200 prisoners of war and buried them in a mass grave on a nearby pig farm.
