Frail Mladic appears in Serb court

“WE have ended a difficult period of our history and removed the stain from the face of Serbia,” Serbian president Boris Tadic said in a triumphant press conference announcing the arrest of Ratko Mladic.

The ruthless Bosnian Serb military leader, charged with orchestrating Europe’s worst massacre of civilians since World War II, was arrested at a relative’s home in a tiny Serbian village yesterday after a 16-year hunt.

He appeared at a closed session in a Belgrade court last night, looking frail and walking slowly as he was escorted by guards.

Serbian state TV said Mladic, 69, was undergoing medical check-ups in a Belgrade detention unit at the Serbian war crimes court, before facing an investigative judge who will read him the war crimes indictment. He faces life in jail if convicted of genocide and other charges.

Mr Tadic said Serbia had begun the process of extraditing the former general to the UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague.

Mladic had two pistols but offered no resistance, and he appeared shrunken, bald and pale, Serbian officials and media said.

Foremost among the horrors Mladic is charged with is the July 1995 slaughter of up to 8,000 Muslim men and boys in the Bosnian town of Srebrenica, which was supposed to be a safe zone guarded by Dutch peacekeepers.

Before sunrise, agents of Serbia’s domestic intelligence agency moved quietly on Mladic’s hideout, a single-storey yellow brick house owned by a relative of the fugitive’s mother, said Radmilo Stanisic, de facto mayor of Lazarevo, a village of some 2,000 residents about 95km north-east of Belgrade.

Justice officials in The Hague said it will take at least a week before Mladic is handed over.

Regular reports on Serbia’s compliance with the chief UN war crimes prosecutor are crucial to its efforts to become a European Union member candidate.