One of the most wanted Bosnian Serb war crimes suspects has been located three times but NATO failed to act on the information, a Croatian newspaper reports today.
A Croatian intelligence source told located
Novi List
that Gen Ratko Mladic, three times in the past two months and informed NATO. "We do not understand why they did not arrest him," the source said.
The Croatian Intelligence Service (HIS) and the National Service for Electronic Monitoring (NSEI) have located Gen Mladic in the Bosnian Serb entity of Republika Srpska and immediately informed Bosnia's NATO-led Stabilisation Force (SFOR) about his exact location and movements, the source said.
On one occasion, Croatian intelligence told SFOR that Gen Mladic was attending a funeral, the source said, without providing further details.
Gen Mladic, the Bosnian Serb wartime military commander, and Gen Radovan Karadzic, Bosnian Serb wartime leader, have been indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) for war crimes and genocide committed during Bosnia's 1992-95 war.
The ICTY recently said it believed Gen Mladic was hiding near Belgrade, while gen Karadzic was hiding in the Republika Srpska.
Last week SFOR carried out two raids in an attempt to arrest Gen Karadzic in villages around the southeastern Bosnian town of Foca, but both ended in failure.
Since 1997 SFOR troops have captured 23 war crimes suspects in Bosnia, while more than 20 others, mostly Bosnian Serbs, remain at large.
AFP