Ratko Mladic Arrested: Key Serbian War Crimes Suspect Reportedly In Custody

(Reuters) - Serbia has arrested Bosnian Serb wartime general Ratko Mladic who is wanted by an international court on genocide charges, a family friend said on Thursday.

"He is in the headquarters of BIA," the person said, referring to the Serbian intelligence agency. "He was arrested in Serbia."

An interior ministry official said earlier police had arrested someone thought to be Mladic and were checking his identity.

"He has some physical features of Mladic. We are analyzing his DNA now," the official said on condition of anonymity.

The suspect, who had documents on him bearing the name Milorad Komadic, was arrested in Serbia on an anonymous tip, he said.

Serbian President Boris Tadic scheduled an urgent news conference for 1300 local time (8 a.m. EDT), without giving any reason. Serbia must arrest Mladic if it wants to join the European Union. The former Bosnian Serb commander is sought by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) for genocide during the 1992-5 Bosnian war.

The European Commission said it was awaiting confirmation of whether Serbian police have arrested Mladic and said such a move would show the country wanted to move forward on European Union membership.

Croatian newspaper Jutarnji List, which first reported the story citing Serbian police sources, said Serbian special forces had made the arrest on Thursday in Serbia.

The paper said it followed a tip-off that Komadic bore a resemblance to Mladic.

The prosecutor's office at the ICTY in The Hague said it could not comment on operational issues.

(Additional reporting by Aaron Gray-Block in Amsterdam; editing by Daria Sito-Sucic and Philippa Fletcher)

Copyright 2011 Thomson Reuters. Click for Restrictions.

Comments

[Great Goliath]

07:58 PM on 05/30/2011

The reason Alija Isetbegovic was never prosecuted is because he wasn't a war criminial.

By they way the people of Darfur are muslims, they just happen to be non-arab muslims. so the poster that claimed otherwise need to brush up on his reading skills as his own source says this.

[Great Goliath]

07:58 PM on 05/30/2011

I am not sure why people claim that all factions are equal in blame, when facts tells us otherwise.
The bosnian-SERBS started the war.They started the war and their goal was to add at least all majority serb areas in Bosnia to the country Serbia.To do this they needed to ethnically-cleanse western and eastern Bosnia.
According to the CIA the Serbs were responsible for 90% of all the ethnic cleansing. 83% of the 40 000 or so dead civilans were bosniaks (Bosnian muslims), 10% were Serbs. Of the Serb losses the vast majority were soldiers and a number of the Serb civlians were killed when the Serbs besieged Sarajevo. Of the estimated 20K-50K women raped the vast majority were Bosnian Muslim (and they were raped so that they would give birth to Christian children).
I could go on,but my point is just like in WW2 all sides were not equal in blame, yes there were Serbs that were murderered, raped and tortured and that was and will always be wrong. But in comparasion numberwise it literally is a drop in the sea. The allies did wrong on the German people, but there is no doubt German was to blame for WW2 and the majority of the atrocities during the war, culminating the Holocaust. Germans have dealt with this blame, it's time the Serbs do. Just like the Germans wanted Lebensraum so did the Serbs and genocide was road towards that. This moral relativism must end.

[procrustes13]

11:59 PM on 05/27/2011

Serbia was right in the whole Yugoslav war business. Serbs had veto on secession in Croatia and Bosnia and these were not respected. Milosevic proposed a US-style system for Yugoslavia as the existing constitution was unsuitable for multi-party politics (so decentralised that the only cohesion in the country was through the League of Communists). Milosevic was right. The US policy was to keep Yugoslavia together as long as IMF Structural Adjustment could be implemented through their favourite Ante Markovic. As soon as he resigned, they were for breaking up the country using all means.

[Mattjoe3]

07:30 PM on 05/27/2011

I am astounded by the number of people who still believe these acts are the isolated expressions of a single heinous individual.....

Do some research please, the blood of Yugoslavia is on more hands than anyone mainstream cares to mention.

[procrustes13]

01:59 PM on 05/27/2011

A terrible development for Serbia. It nearly got out of this disastrous EU as the EU is being exposed as an economic suicide pact and now the integration into this disaster will be stepped up because the Empire-installed elite in Belgrade want it that way. The elite in Belgrade are a shameful mob. They really are. This kind of boot-licking toadying crowd is what's being planned for Libya.

[Lohikaarme]

08:14 AM on 05/27/2011

So now is time for the brits to cough up that other war criminal, Tony Blair, and send him to the Hague.

[Francois Bergeron]

04:33 AM on 05/27/2011

Isn't this rather big news?

[luzmorales]

02:08 AM on 05/27/2011

This guy makes the same little round fishy mouth as Donald Trump!

[dirtytrickz]

11:02 PM on 05/26/2011

I am sure we will hear the sentence "is it a crime to love one's country" a lot these days.

[JacksonD]

10:41 PM on 05/26/2011

More than a few people believe that Serbia knew where he was all this time and only turned him over because he is sick and will probably either get better treatment because of it or die soon. The payoff? They want into the EU and may believe this will help their case. I don't know if that's true but it certainly is plausible.

[Haastnooit]

02:52 AM on 05/27/2011

It's true... last week Serbia was rejected by the eu because they didn't do enough to catch these war criminals and this is what happens. Next week their application will be on the doormat af the eu again

[procrustes13]

11:57 PM on 05/27/2011

Best thing that can happen to Serbia is to stay out of the EU. But the Belgrade elite being what it is post-coup, as obedient as they come, as desiring to surrender to financial capital as they come, this is a disaster.

[GENE DEVAUX]

08:35 PM on 05/26/2011

If he had been president or vice president of the United States, he might never have been charged. Bush and Cheney are still running around free. They took us to war on false charges of WMD in Iraq when they knew there were none. There is a great movie that everyone should see; it's called, "The Green Zone". It's the story of our soldiers risking their lives to find non-existent WMD in Iraq.

[eliteandproud]

08:26 PM on 05/26/2011

There were "bad guys" on all sides in Bosnia, yet Serbia took all the blame; Izetbegovic left Srebrenica undefended before the widely anticipated offensive, suggesting a tacit deal. Albright drawing attention to Srebrenica was also a convenient distraction from Croatia's Operation Storm.

The Hague might have a more difficult time prosecuting Mladic than the world hopes. I've been traveling in the former Yugoslavia since the 1980s and trying to figure it all out for decades. There remain many unanswered questions, unsubstantiated news stories, fuzzy facts and figures. There are no heroes, and Mladic wasn't the only villain.

[wereeverywhere]

10:41 PM on 05/26/2011

There were some heroes fighting against the barbarism of narrow nationalism gone crazy.
http://www.enotes.com/portraits-sarajevo-salem/portraits-sarajevo

"PORTRAITS OF SARAJEVO presents a gallery of unlikely heroes, ordinary people going about their daily business. There is Mile Plakalovic, a Serbian taxi driver who risked his life to rescue the wounded and drive them to the hospital. For love of beauty, film technician Refik Besirevic bought an expensive vase after his family’s apartment was destroyed. Brigadier General Jovan Divjak defected from the Yugoslav People’s Army early in the war in order to aid the Bosnian cause..."

The youth and workers who made Otpur a success against an authoritarian regime in the aftermath of these crimes were heroic.

Also:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vedran_Smailović

Vedran Smajlović (born November 11, 1956), known as the "Cellist of Sarajevo", is a musician from Bosnia and Herzegovina, and a former cellist in the Sarajevo String Quartet...
Smajlović is known for playing his cello, notably Albinoni's Adagio in G Minor, during the siege. His character was immortalised in the book by Steven Galloway entitled The Cellist of Sarajevo, playing his cello to honour each of the 22 people who had been killed by a bomb while they were queuing for bread...
Smailović was also known for playing for free at different funerals during the siege, even though such funerals would often be targeted by enemy fire.

[procrustes13]

02:00 PM on 05/27/2011

Srebrenica's troops were ordered out by someone in mid-July 1995. That's how the VRS grabbed the town, the defenders left in a column. The people who were later killed were almost all from that column.

[Deleberis]

08:16 PM on 05/26/2011

Finally.

[taketheother]

07:03 PM on 05/26/2011

selective justice others who are deserving

bill clinton madeleine albright, wes clark, george bush, dick cheney, don rumsfeld, franjo tudjman, alija izetbegovic, among many many others

and what say the convenient humanitarians about the illegal wars in libya and elsewhere

take your blinders off

[james luko]

10:14 PM on 05/26/2011

selective justice indeed, remember, Christopher Hitchens made a great case for indicting Henry Kissinger for war crimes no ? so..as you say, selective justice.

[speeddeeps]

06:35 PM on 05/26/2011

I remember in 90's when i was in high school(this was the Northeast) this Croatian Americans and Serb Americans started fighting, even though their parents and them were born here, weird that people still have affinity for the ''old country'' after generations