Search for war crimes fugitive proves fruitless

SERBIA launched a major search yesterday for war crimes fugitive General Ratko Mladic, sending scores of special police to comb through a western town on orders from Serbia’s war crimes prosecutor.

The search focused on the town of Valjevo — a town previously mentioned as one of the possible hiding places for the former Bosnian Serb army commander. Amateur video posted on YouTube showed masked special police searching a furniture factory compound.

A source close to the police said Mladic was not found after the operation. He said the hunt also focused on people who are believed to be helping Mladic evade justice.

“This is one in a series of actions” that are planned to locate Mladic and another remaining war crimes fugitive, wartime Croatian Serb leader Goran Hadzic, said Bruno Vekaric, the spokesman for Serbia’s war crimes prosecutor.

Mladic has been on the run since 1995, when he was indicted for genocide by the UN war crimes court for former Yugoslavia. The court charged that he masterminded the 1995 slaughter of about 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica and orchestrated an armed siege of the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo, during the 1992-95 Bosnian war.