BELGRADE (Reuters) - Bosnian Serb wartime general Ratko Mladic was arrested in Serbia on Thursday after 15 years on the run from international genocide charges, opening the way for the once-pariah state to approach the European mainstream.
Mladic, accused of orchestrating the massacre of 8,000 Muslim men and boys in the town of Srebrenica and a brutal 43-month siege of Sarajevo during Bosnia's 1992-5 war, was found in a farmhouse owned by a cousin, a police official said.
"Mladic was handcuffed and whisked away," said the official, who added that he had been cooperative. The once burly and widely feared general was not disguised but had false identity papers and looked haggard and much older, he said.
"Hardly anyone could recognise him."
A friend of the Mladic family said he had been put on a plane to the international war crimes tribunal in The Hague, but Serbia said he was still in its custody.
"On behalf of the Republic of Serbia I can announce the arrest of Ratko Mladic. The extradition process is under way," Serbian President Boris Tadic told reporters in Belgrade just hours before a visit by a top official of the European Union, which told Serbia it must arrest Mladic before it could join.
"This step is a testimony that Serbia is a state which has firmly established rule of law," he said later at a joint news conference with EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton.
Tadic confirmed Mladic, 69, had been detained in Serbia, which had long said it could not find a man who is still seen as a hero by many Serbs and whose Bosnian Serb Army was armed and funded by the late Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic, who died in 2006 while on trial for war crimes.
read more @ http://thestar.com.my/news/story.asp?file=/2011/5/27/worldupdates/2011-05-27T010433Z_01_NOOTR_RTRMDNC_0_-573010-5&sec=Worldupdates
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