Mladic video footage emerges

Video clips showing war crimes fugitive Ratko Mladic living freely in Serbia have emerged on Bosnian state TV.

Sarajevo-based TV Federacije did not say where it got the video footage shown on Wednesday, but a Serbian official said it was part of material seized last December from Mladic’s Belgrade home and handed over to United Nations prosecutors.

The station said the home videos were taken over a period of years, one as recently as 2008. But Belgrade officials claimed yesterday that the most recent was filmed in 2001 when the former Bosnian Serb army commander was last seen in public before disappearing.

Mladic has been on the run since 1995 when the UN war crimes court in The Hague, Netherlands, charged him with genocide for orchestrating the massacre of about 8,000 Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica during Bosnia’s 1992-95 war – the worst carnage in Europe since the Second World War.

Pro-Western leaders in Belgrade insist they do not know where Mladic is, although their recent investigation revealed that he had been hiding in different apartments in a new part of the city as recently as 2006.

His capture is a condition for Serbian progress towards membership in the European Union.

Some of the footage showed him singing popular Serbian folk songs and dancing at weddings and private parties, as well as receiving guests at his house in a Belgrade neighbourhood, or cuddling his baby granddaughter.

A video dated September 2000 showed him at a wedding party of one of his bodyguards in a restaurant near Sarajevo near the main Nato base in Bosnia.

Another has him slowly walking on a snow-covered mountain path with a cane, looking significantly older than in other footage.

Another amateur video, apparently taken by someone from his family circle, shows him sitting in peaceful wooded surroundings of what the television said were Serbian Army military barracks.

The Serbian government official in charge of relations with the UN tribunal, Rasim Ljajic, said at an urgently-called news conference that the footage was part of the material impounded last December.

Olga Kavran, spokeswoman for the UN tribunal’s prosecutor, said the prosecution possessed the same Mladic videos, but refused to comment on their context to avoid jeopardising the search for the fugitive.

Mr Ljajic claimed the release of the videos was designed to “minimise a recent positive assessment about Serbia’s co-operation with the Hague tribunal” by US secretary of state Hillary Clinton and chief prosecutor Serge Brammertz.

“This is no coincidence,” he said. “The timing suggests it was not done with good intention.”

He was referring to Serbia’s efforts to persuade the Netherlands to allow the implementation of a European Union deal with Serbia even though Mladic is not in jail.