BELGRADE, Serbia - Serbia launched a major search Monday for war-crimes fugitive Gen. Ratko Mladic, sending scores of special police to comb through a western town on orders from the country's war-crimes prosecutor.
The search focused on the town of Valjevo -- an area previously mentioned as one of the possible hiding places for the former Bosnian Serb army commander. Amateur video posted on YouTube showed masked special police with automatic weapons searching a furniture factory compound in Valjevo.
A source close to the police, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said Mladic was not found after the operation, which involved up to 100 policemen. He said the hunt also focused on people who are believed to be helping Mladic evade justice.
"This is one in a series of actions" that are planned to locate Mladic and another remaining war crimes fugitive, wartime Croatian Serb leader Goran Hadzic, said Bruno Vekaric, the spokesman for Serbia's war-crimes prosecutor.
Mladic has been on the run since 1995, when he was indicted for genocide by the United Nations war crimes court for former Yugoslavia. The court charged that he masterminded the 1995 slaughter of about 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica -- the worst carnage in Europe since the Second World War -- and orchestrated an armed siege of the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo, during the 1992-95 Bosnian war.
Mladic's extradition to the UN court in The Hague, Netherlands, is the major precondition set by the European Union for granting pre-membership status to Serbia.
Serbia in July arrested the wartime Bosnian Serb political leader, Radovan Karadzic, and handed him over to The Hague after more than 10 years on the run.
President Boris Tadic said in an interview published Monday that Serbia is determined to capture Mladic if he is in the country.
