THE ARREST:LAZAREVO – Bosnian Serb wartime general Ratko Mladic had two loaded guns but did not resist arrest at a farmhouse owned by a cousin in this northeastern village, a government minister said yesterday.
Rasim Ljajic, the minister in charge of the search for fugitive war criminals, said Mladic “looked pale, as if he had stayed indoors for a long period of time”.
“Mladic had two loaded guns he did not use. He was co-operative and did not resist arrest,” he said. “He spoke calmly with officers.”
A police official said Mladic, accused of orchestrating the massacre of 8,000 Muslim men and boys in the town of Srebrenica and a 43-month siege of Sarajevo during Bosnia’s 1992-5 war, was found in a farmhouse owned by a cousin.
“Mladic was handcuffed and whisked away,” said the official, adding that the formerly burly and widely feared general was not disguised and looked haggard and much older. “Hardly anyone could recognise him.”
Serbian state-run RTS TV broadcast footage of Mladic being escorted by Serbian police to an interview with an investigative judge at the special war crimes court in Belgrade.
The 15-second video showed Mladic wearing a cap and a windbreaker jacket, moving slowly with a slight limp. The footage also showed Mladic’s lawyer, Milos Saljic, opening doors for his client.
Mladic was arrested in the village of Lazarevo, near the northeastern town of Zrenjanin about 100km (60 miles) from the capital Belgrade in a pre-dawn police raid, the official said.
Police cordoned off the area and stopped journalists from approaching the farmhouse.
The former Bosnian Serb top commander had false identification documents under the name Milorad Komadic.
Another police source said Mladic has health problems, including a partly paralysed hand as well as kidney problems and high blood pressure.
“He underwent a medical checkup and his lawyer brought him medications,” he said.
Villagers in Lazarevo, mostly Serbs from Bosnia or Croatia, said they had not known that Mladic was hiding in the house.
“It was over quickly. Many times we joked he must be here as his relative lives in the village,” said one man who only gave his first name as Djordje.
On the outskirts of the village, a banner reading “Ratko, our hero” was tied to a traffic sign. Angry villagers also attacked a local TV crew and broke a camera in a brawl.
At one point Gen Mladic had been reported to be safe somewhere in Siberia. But tribunal prosecutor Carla Del Ponte insisted, in the face of hot denials from Belgrade, that he was in Serbia.
After a landlord came forward saying he had once rented an apartment to the general in the capital, Serbia made the embarrassing admission that Mladic had indeed been hiding there as late as 2006, when, it said, he vanished without trace.
Nato forces overseeing the peace in Bosnia were often brought in to check out Mladic sightings, handing over the frustrating chase in late 2004 to a European Union force. None of them had any luck.
In June 2010, the Mladic family filed a request to have him declared dead, based on the fact that they had not seen him in seven years and that he had been very sick.
A legal death notice ending the manhunt would have been greeted with outrage by The Hague, Nato and the EU alike, and in September 2010 a Belgrade court rejected the request. – (Reuters)