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Police search near Mladic hideout
YOUR E-MAIL ALERTSZEPA, Bosnia-Herzegovina (Reuters) -- Bosnian Serb police said on Wednesday they launched a dawn search in a mountainous region of eastern Bosnia often reported to be a hideout of top Bosnian Serb war crimes suspect Ratko Mladic. A spokesman said police were searching the area near the eastern town of Zepa, several kilometers from Han Pijesak, Mladic's wartime base where he was last reported to have been seen in an underground military bunker in mid-2004. "We are conducting the search of objects and locations in the wider area of Zepa since 0400 local time (0300 GMT)," spokesman Radovan Pejic told Reuters by telephone. He declined to give more details. The Bosnian Serb news agency SRNA said police were searching for Mladic, Bosnian Serb military commander in the 1992-95 war. A Reuters photographer said police sealed off the main road leading to Zepa, a remote town which was an isolated Muslim enclave besieged by Mladic's forces throughout the war. SRNA reported police helicopters hovered above the area. Pejic said soldiers of NATO, which has failed to catch Mladic and his fellow genocide suspect and Bosnian Serb wartime leader Radovan Karadzic on several occasions, and its successor European Union peacekeeping force did not take part in the operation. Karadzic and Mladic were indicted over the wartime siege of Sarajevo and the 1995 massacre of 8,000 Muslim men and boys in the eastern enclave of Srebrenica. They are among six Serbs, four from Bosnia, who are sought by the U.N. war crimes court. Serbia and the Serb half of Bosnia are under Western pressure to extradite the two top fugitives, believed to be hiding in Bosnia's Serb Republic or in neighboring Serbia and Montenegro. The fact that they are still at large is obstructing the two countries' progress towards closer ties with the EU and NATO. The respected Belgrade newspaper Glas Javnosti reported on Wednesday that Mladic had been located in Russia and had been living there since May 2005. "The general lived briefly in St Petersburg and then moved to Moscow," Glas Javnosti quoted an unnamed source as saying. It said that, since December, intensive talks had been going on, including with the Hague tribunal, on his surrender. However. the Hague chief prosecutor's office insists Mladic is in Serbia. "Secret talks have been under way and visits have been swapped by Belgrade and Moscow officials to discuss whether to hand over Mladic to the tribunal via Russia, on which our side insists, or to bring him discreetly to Serbia," the source was quoted as saying. 
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