The decade-long hunt for the Bosnian Serb military commander Ratko Mladic appeared to be close to a breakthrough on Tuesday after police revealed they had intercepted one of his cellphone calls.
Serbian officials said the arrest of General Mladic — wanted for genocide for his involvement in the 1995 Srebrenica massacre — ”has never been closer”.
There is now growing speculation that Mladic’s capture could be imminent. Over the weekend, former security officials in Belgrade said he was secretly negotiating with the Serbian authorities, with a view to giving himself up to the United Nations tribunal in The Hague.
On Tuesday one security official claimed that the net was closing fast on the former general. ”Mladic made a mistake recently by using a mobile phone to make a call to his friend,” the official told the Associated Press in Belgrade. ”That helped the authorities locate his aides who know where he was hiding.”
Last week Serbia’s war crimes prosecutor, Vladimir Vukcevic, revealed the authorities had identified a number of supporters who had been hiding Mladic and the wartime Bosnian Serb political leader Radovan Karadzic. Both men are wanted by the UN war crimes tribunal for allegedly ordering the 1995 massacre of 8 000 Muslims in Srebrenica during the Bosnian war.
Serbia has been under growing international pressure to capture the fugitives following the arrest this month of Ante Gotovina, the Croatian war crimes suspect who was detained in the Canary Islands after investigators traced his cellphone records. The arrest came after Britain, in particular, insisted that Croatia had to give up Gotovina before it could join the EU.
Last week Miroljub Labus, Serbia’s deputy prime minister, bluntly warned his Cabinet colleagues that Serbia’s own EU aspirations were at risk unless it located and extradited Mladic and Dr Karadzic, the two outstanding fugitives from the Bosnian war. Both have been on the run since 1995. They are believed to be hiding somewhere in Serbia and Montenegro.
On Tuesday, one Serbian newspaper, Glas Javnosti, reported that Mladic’s pension payments had now been stopped — another apparent step towards his handover by Serbia’s democratically elected government.
On Monday, however, Serbia’s interior minister in charge of police, Dragan Jocic, denied reports that the authorities were negotiating terms under which Mladic would surrender to the tribunal. The police had ”certain information” but ”not enough to locate Mladic”, Jocic said.
He added: ‘There is a realistic possibility that they [Mladic and Karadzic] are hiding in Serbia. But they are experienced warriors, men who survived the war under difficult circumstances and they know how to do it.” Mladic was almost certainly hiding ”without massive security” around him, making it hard to locate him, Jocic added.
But, Zoran Dragisic, an expert on security issues from Belgrade’s Faculty of Defence, said that Jocic’s statement appeared to be part of the Serbian government’s ”tactics” as it negotiated Mladic’s ”voluntary surrender”.
”I don’t believe that the government does not know where Mladic is moving,” Dragisic told Belgrade’s B-92 radio. ”Jocic’s statement appears to be a part of the [arrest] process. I believe that Mladic will soon be at the Hague tribunal.” – Guardian Unlimited Â