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Serbian President Boris Tadic said that Mladic was arrested in Serbia on Thursday, and that the extradition process is underway.
“This is the result of full cooperation with the Hague Tribunal,” he told a press conference in Belgrade.
“Today we close one chapter of our recent history that will bring us to reconciliation in the region,” he added.
“It is good for Serbia that this page in our history has been closed…
And I believe that all the doors to our EU integration have now been opened,” he said.
“At the same time, we cannot forget the search for Goran Hadzic,” Tadic told reporters, adding that the hunt for those people who helped Ratko Mladic hide would also continue.
“No one should doubt today or ever that Serbia doesn’t cooperate with the Hague Tribunal,” Tadic said in response to a reporter’s question, promising that Goran Hadzic would be arrested.
He also said that there would be investigation to determine why Mladic was not arrested earlier, and to see if anyone in past and current governments had been involved in keeping Mladic from justice.
Asked if Mladic would be transferred to the Hague Tribunal, Tadic said that it was not up to him to decide, but up to the courts.
Tadic declined to give more information on the details of the arrest, explaining that the security services would provide that data. As Balkan Insight has unofficially learned, Mladic was arrested in the village of Lazarevo near Zrenjanin, where he was hidden under the name Milorad Komadic.
Balkan Insight has learned from Serbia’s Intelligence Agency, BIA, that Mladic is currently being held at the BIA premises in Banjica neighbourhood in Belgrade.
Milos Salkjic, the lawyer of the Mladic family, told Balkan Insight this morning that he had not been contacted by the prosecutor’s office, but said he will definitely represent Mladic if he has been arrrested.
Ratko Mladic, one of the world’s most wanted war crimes suspects, has been indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in the Hague on charges of genocide and other war crimes committed during the 1992-95 Bosnian war.
Hadzic, now the last ICTY suspect at large, was the leader of the breakaway Croatian Serb republic, and is charged by the Tribunal with 14 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in Croatia between August 1991 and June 1992.
Croatian portal Jutarnji.hr reported earlier today that it had learned from a special unit of the Serbian Interior Ministry that a man called Milorad Komadic, believed to be Ratko Mladic, was arrested Thursday morning.
According to the local media, the arrest was based on a tip-off that the man called Milorad Komadic had some identification marks that matched Mladic’s appearance.
