Top war crimes fugitive General Ratko Mladic is being guarded by armed men and has no intention of surrendering to the UN war crimes tribunal, according to a senior Serbian official.
The Blic daily newspaper quoted Serbian war crimes prosecutor Vladimir Vukcevic as saying that Mladic’s capture will be a much tougher job than the arrest in July of another genocide suspect, Radovan Karadzic.
Many hard-liners in Serbia’s police and the military remain loyal to Mladic, whom they consider to be a war hero.
“The inner circle of guards around Ratko Mladic includes people who are ready to use weapons at any moment,” Mr Vukcevic, who heads a Serbian government team in charge of the hunt for war criminals, told the newspaper.
“That is why the arrest of the most wanted... suspect is much harder than was the case with Karadzic.”
Mladic and Karadzic, both wartime Bosnian Serb leaders, were charged with genocide by the UN war crimes tribunal for former Yugoslavia in The Hague, Netherlands, for allegedly orchestrating the massacre of 8,000 Muslims in Srebrenica in 1995.
Karadzic was arrested in July near Belgrade after more than a decade on the run. Mladic and a Croatian Serb suspect, Goran Hadzic, remain at large. Their arrests are crucial for Serbia’s efforts to seek European Union membership.
During a visit this week to Belgrade, chief UN prosecutor for the former Yugoslavia Serge Brammertz expressed “careful optimism” that Serbia will arrest Mladic and Hadzic. Senior Serbian leaders have pledged the two will end up in The Hague.
But the Blic paper quoted Mr Vukcevic as saying that “according to the information that the (security) services have gathered, Mladic has no intention to surrender”.
He added that Mladic - unlike Karadzic who lived in disguise under a false identity - has not tried to change his appearance and is hiding in a “completely different manner than Karadzic”.
He gave no other details and did not specify whether the authorities were closing in on Mladic.
Yesterday, another Serbian official in charge of the hunt for war criminals, Rasim Ljajic, said in a radio interview that documents containing Mladic’s fingerprints had disappeared from the police archives. He said an investigation was under way to determine who was responsible.
AP