Capture spreads fear among names of hate

BELGRADE - Slobodan Milosevic, who ruled unassailably through four Balkans wars, sat alone in a small windowless cell yesterday as the list of charges for him to answer grew.

In Belgrade, the authorities said Milosevic would be prosecuted for inciting his bodyguards to fire on police when they attempted to arrest him on Saturday, in addition to the existing charges against him.

Serbian police have displayed a huge stash of arms found at the former leader's house, including a rocket-propelled grenade launcher, 27 Kalashnikov rifles, anti-tank mines, hand grenades and five crates of ammunition.

Milosevic was packing a German-made 9mm Sig-Sauer automatic while resisting arrest. His daughter Marija, 36, was also facing charges after a paraffin test confirmed that she had fired five rounds of ammunition at a car in the convoy that took her father to Belgrade's central prison.

The police said they had discovered documents calling for "organised armed action" on Sinisa Vucinic, one of the armed volunteers protecting Milosevic at the house until he surrendered on Sunday.

The news of Milosevic's arrest will resonate at 129 Blagoje Parovica, home to the second most notorious war criminal believed to be in Belgrade - Ratko Mladic, the Bosnian Serb general who wrote his name across Bosnia in blood.

Now that the world's most wanted war criminal is cooling his heels under lock and key, the arrest of Mladic may not be far away. There were riots yesterday in Srebrenica, scene of the worst single atrocity of a decade of wars in the Balkans, when war crimes investigators questioned the Bosnian Muslim who led the defence of the town.

Mladic is personally indicted for the murder of 8000 Bosnian Muslim men in a week in Srebrenica in 1995.

Another man who will be nervous this week is Nikola Sainovic, who is indicted for atrocities committed in Kosovo. Sainovic is charged alongside Milosevic for abuse of power in Serbia, and is expected to be arrested soon. A senior Government official under Milosevic, Sainovic was the one who issued the orders to security forces to force thousands of Albanians from their homes in Kosovo in 1999.

Other indictees who may fear time is running out for them include Milan Milutinovic, president of the Serbian republic during the Kosovo war, Dragoljub Ojdanic, the Army chief of staff at that time and Vlajko Stojiljkovic, who was Serbian interior minister.

A spokeswoman at The Hague war crimes tribunal said that new indictments were being prepared against Milosevic for war crimes committed during the wars in Croatia and Bosnia. He is already indicted for genocide and other crimes in Kosovo.

The Serb authorities insisted that there are no immediate plans to extradite the former President, and that he has been arrested only to face trial for crimes committed in Serbia.

Milosevic's lawyer, Toma Fila, claimed yesterday that Serbian prosecutors do not have enough evidence to secure a conviction.

The move to arrest Milosevic came at the 11th hour before the expiry of a United States deadline for Yugoslavia to cooperate with The Hague - or risk losing $US50 million ( $124.6 million) in aid, and it is possible that the authorities rushed to arrest Milosevic before they had gathered all the evidence against him.

He has been remanded in custody for 30 days while investigations of the charges continue.

Following the arrest the US has ruled Yugoslavia fit for aid but warned Belgrade to step up cooperation with the war crimes tribunal if it wanted a big donors' conference to go ahead.

The Bush Administration threatened to withdraw backing for a conference where Belgrade hopes to raise up to $US1 billion if it did not work with The Hague.

Serbia's Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic said he expected the conference to go ahead but the US State Department said full cooperation included passing legislation and transferring further Hague indictees.

- INDEPENDENT, REUTERS

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