BELGRADE: Confusion surrounded the fate of top Bosnian Serb war crimes fugitive General Ratko Mladic on Tuesday after the Tanjug news agency quoted a television station as saying that he had been arrested. However, the Serbian government denied the report.

Tanjug said TV BN reported the wartime Bosnian Serb Army commander had been taken into custody in the Serbian capital Belgrade and was being transferred via the northeastern Bosnian city of Tuzla to the UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague.

An earlier report by Belgrade’s Studio B television said Gen Mladic had been located ‘in the area of Tuzla’, which lies close to the mountainous border with Serbia.

Gen Mladic was indicted in 1995 for genocide for the 43-month siege of Sarajevo which claimed 12,000 lives and for orchestrating the 1995 massacre of some 8,000 Muslims at Srebrenica, the worst atrocity in Europe since World War Two. —Reuters