Police deny report war crimes suspect Mladic located
Serbia’s police chief today denied reports top war crimes fugitive Ratko Mladic has been located, but said authorities were working to find him and extradite him to the UN war crimes tribunal.
The independent Belgrade Danas daily newspaper reported the current location of the war-time Bosnian Serb army commander was provided to the Serbian government by chief UN war crimes prosecutor Carla Del Ponte during her June 2 visit to Belgrade.
Prosecution spokeswoman Florence Hartmann said “it’s not true” that Del Ponte gave Belgrade Mladic’s precise location during her last visit, but insisted that she knew he was in Serbia.
Serbia’s Interior Minister Dragan Jocic, in a report to a government committee in charge of cooperation with the tribunal in The Hague, Netherlands, said there was no truth to the “speculation” Mladic had been located, or that the government was negotiating his surrender.
But he said the police were “continuing their regular activities” to find Mladic and other war crimes fugitives.
Mladic and another top suspect, Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, have been on the run since 1995 when they were jointly indicted for genocide in the massacre in Srebrenica of about 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys by Serb troops in July that year – the worst atrocity in Europe since the Second World War.
Mladic is believed to be hiding in Serbia, and Karadzic in neighbouring Bosnia.
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