Ratko Mladic, Europe's most wanted war crimes
suspect, has been arrested in Serbia after years as a
fugitive,President Boris Tadic said Thursday.
"On behalf of the Republic of Serbia we announce that Ratko Mladic has been arrested," Tadic told reporters.
Mladic, who was arrested by the Serbian Security Intelligence
Agency,will be extradited to the U.N. war crimes tribunal in The Hague,
Netherlands, Tadic said. He did not specify when, but said, "an
extradition process is under way."
Natasha Butler, a spokesperson for Stefan Fuele, the European
Commissioner for Enlargement, said the European Union was still
awaiting confirmation of Mladic's arrest.
"If the arrested man is actually Ratko Mladic, it means that Serbia
has realized the importance of full cooperation with the International
Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia and reconciliation in the
region," Butler said.
Croatian media, which first broke the story, said police there got
confirmation from their Serbian colleagues that DNA analysis confirmed
Mladic's identity. Belgrade's B92 radio said Mladic was arrested
Thursday in a village close to the northern Serbian town of Zrenjanin.
Mladic has been on the run since 1995 when he was indicted by the
U.N. war crimes tribunal for genocide in the slaughter of some 8,000
Bosnian Muslim men and boys in the U.N.-protected enclave of Srebrenica
and other atrocities committed by his troops during the 1992-1995
Balkan conflict.
Prosecutors have said they believed he was hiding in Serbia under
the protection of hardliners who consider him a hero. Mladic was last
seen in Belgrade in 2006.
Serbia has been under intense pressure from the international
community to catch the fugitive. The failure to capture and extradite
Mladic had been a major obstacle to Serbian government efforts to
achieve candidate status for European Union membership. Xinhua
