Serbia urges Mladic to surrender

Gen Mladic is charged with genocide among other alleged crimes

Serbian Defence Minister Dragan Sutanovac has urged the two remaining Serbs wanted for war crimes to give themselves up.

Mr Sutanovac said former Bosnian Serb army commander Ratko Mladic and ex-Croatian Serb leader Goran Hadzic were "holding the whole country to ransom".

Mr Sutanovac told the Serbian daily Blic that he was calling on Gen Mladic and Mr Hadzic "to turn themselves in".

Gen Mladic's former political boss Radovan Karadzic is now facing trial.

Gen Mladic and Mr Hadzic are the two remaining fugitives on the wanted list of the international war crimes tribunal in The Hague, where Mr Karadzic is being held.

"I personally would like Mladic to surrender as soon as possible. I've called on him to do so on a number of occasions," Mr Sutanovac said.

The European Union is seeking the wanted Serbs' arrest and transfer to The Hague as a precondition for eventual Serbian membership of the EU.

Gen Mladic, like Mr Karadzic, is accused of genocide and crimes against humanity over atrocities committed during the Bosnian war in the early 1990s.

The crimes include the Srebrenica massacre of up to 8,000 Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) men and boys and the shelling of civilians in Sarajevo.

Serbian President Boris Tadic has said Belgrade will fulfil its international obligations to arrest the remaining war crime suspects.

Mr Karadzic was arrested in Belgrade last month and transferred to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague.