Posted on 02/21/2006 12:50:51 PM PST by nuconvert
War Crimes Fugitive Believed Cornered
By DUSAN STOJANOVIC, Associated Press Writer
War crimes fugitive Gen. Ratko Mladic, accused of genocide and crimes against humanity stemming from the Bosnian war, has been located and authorities are negotiating his surrender, a top state security official said Tuesday.
Mladic was located but "he has yet not been arrested," the official, who is close to the operation to locate Mladic, told The Associated Press. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media.
The state news agency Tanjug reported that Mladic was arrested in Belgrade and being taken to a U.S.-run air base for transport to the U.N. war crimes tribunal.
However, the prime minister's spokesman denied the Tanjug report that Mladic was arrested.
Srdjan Djuric, spokesman for Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica, told the AP in a statement that Mladic had not been arrested. He called the report a "manipulation" to attempt to derail the government's efforts to detain the wartime Bosnian Serb army commander, who has been on the run since the 1990s.
There have been numerous incorrect reports in the past that Mladic was captured.
Mladic is wanted by the U.N. war crimes tribunal on genocide charges for allegedly orchestrating Europe's worst carnage since World War II — the massacre of 8,000 Muslim men and boys from Srebrenica in 1995 — and for other crimes during Bosnia's 1992-95 war.
Serbia, seeking to establish closer ties with the European Union and NATO, faces renewed international isolation if it fails to extradite Mladic to the U.N. tribunal in The Hague, Netherlands.
European Union officials have warned that Serbia's initial talks on joining the 25-nation bloc could be frozen unless Mladic is handed over by the end of February.
Officials at the EU and NATO said they had no information about Mladic's reported arrest.
Earlier Tuesday, senior Kostunica aide Vladeta Jankovic predicted Mladic would be captured "soon."
However, Jankovic said he had no information on whether Mladic's hiding place had been located or whether the government was involved in any negotiations for his surrender.
The private Beta news agency also reported that "an operation was in progress to locate" Mladic. The Belgrade-based agency did not name the source of its report, and there was no official confirmation of the alleged operation.
Historically - is this correct. Millions of German civilians were killed right after WWII and Stalin's thirst for killing went well into the 1950's - killing millions in the Baltic States and the Ukraine. Turkey (a proposed EU member) killed thousands of Kurds right up to the present...
Ratko.......what a nice name for a war criminal........
Gee, people are questioning the reliability of news from the Balkans.
Wish they would have applied a healthy skepticism to the Racak hoax.
Well, reporting that he was already arrested was apparently not true.
...allegedly orchestrating Europe's worst alleged carnage since World War II...
They never did find those hundreds of thousands of mass graves that Bill Clinton told us about...unless you want to count the ones we found in Iraq.
BUMP!
Sorry I should have caoptioned...
Wesley Clark with War Criminal Ratko Mladic
Oh pitty the poor Germans! Whatever could they have done to have incited such a mean, mean reaction by the Russians and other Eastern Europeans?
I'm sorry, but I was in Eastern Europe in 1945, I remember it pretty well, and I have to confess that I have remarkably little sympathy for the Germans. You'll excuse me.
The criminal is the one in the center.
Shouldn't that be "Accused war criminal"???
And considering that they were trying to rid the Balkans of a bunch of muslims, I'm not so sure anymore that what they are accused of doing constitutes crimes.
It's a far cry from "Europe's worst carnage." Just in the Balkans alone, I could name three worse crimes: Ethnic cleansing of some 300,000 Serbs from Croatia; Ethnic cleansing of 200,000 Serbs from Kosovo and NATO's 78-day-long indiscriminate bombing campaing in Serbia, causing $100B in damage and costing close to 4,000 lives.
just read a report on yahoo that he killed himself.
My bad. Not Mladic!
Good riddance.
Thanks for the update.
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