BELGRADE (AFP) — Security forces searched Monday for war crimes fugitive Ratko Mladic at a factory in Serbia, whose new government must capture the ex-Bosnian Serb general in order to speed up its EU accession.
Armed with automatic firearms and dressed in all-black masks and outfits, the police surrounded the factory in the southwestern town of Valjevo at mid-morning, according to officials.
"Under the orders of the war crimes prosecution, the interior ministry conducted a search of the Vujic Valjevo factory," an interior ministry source told AFP.
"We were verifying information according to which Mladic could be there, but according to the first information, nobody was found," the source said.
Vujic Valjevo is run by a large Serbian company that manufactures windows and bottled water. Sources said police also searched houses occupied by its management in a bid to find some evidence of financial aid for Mladic while in hiding.
Mladic, 66, is wanted by a UN tribunal for genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity during his time as commander of the Bosnian Serb military forces during the 1992-95 war in Bosnia.
He notably faces charges relating to the siege of Sarajevo which claimed more than 10,000 lives and for the 1995 Srebrenica massacre of some 8,000 Muslim men and boys -- Europe's worst atrocity since World War II.
The wartime Bosnian Serb general has used the Valjevo region as a hideout in the past, a former Serbian police chief said.
He was located there in 2001 after security services intercepted a telephone call, according to Goran Petrovic, who used to head Serbia's secret police, in a report in 2006.
Journalists were prevented from getting close to the site, said broadcasters B92.
Citing unnamed high-ranking officials from the interior ministry, B92 said the security services were also hunting for people thought to have helped Mladic avoid justice.
Speaking to the media later, the factory's owners, Vladislav and Vidoje Vujic, whose houses were searched and had some photographs confiscated, denied they had any links with Mladic.
"I have never met him in my life, nor do I know him privately," Vidoje Vujic told B92 television.
Mladic has been wanted since 1995 by the UN's International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague, where the Bosnian Serb president Radovan Karadzic now is on trial.
Last month, Serbia said it had intensified its hunt for Mladic to an unprecedented level ahead of a confirmed visit in a week's time by the UN tribunal's chief prosecutor Serge Brammertz.
"That's three weeks before he submits his report on Serbia's cooperation with the tribunal to the UN Security Council," Rasim Ljajic, minister in charge of cooperation with the ICTY, told the Vecernje Novosti newspaper.
Serbia's cooperation with the UN war crimes tribunal is a key condition for closer ties with the European Union, which the new pro-Western government in Belgrade hopes to join by 2014.
Such cooperation notably involves the arrest and transfer to The Hague of Mladic and the only other remaining war crimes fugitive, Goran Hadzic, a wartime Croatian Serb leader.
But Mladic remains at large despite several similar operations in the past few years.
Karadzic was arrested in July on a bus in Belgrade, where he had been living incognito as a bearded alternative medicine guru.
According to Serbian officials, Mladic lived openly in Belgrade under the protection of the military up until June 2002. He received its pension until the end of 2005.
For three-and-a-half years up to January 2006, Mladic sheltered in at least five relatively modest Belgrade flats, aided by supporters who fed him and paid the rent.
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