MONTENEGRO:The UN's chief war crimes prosecutor urged Montenegro yesterday to intensify its hunt for fugitives such as Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, three weeks after a wanted Serbian police general was discovered living quietly in a popular seaside resort.
Former Bosnian Serb leader Karadzic is believed to be hiding in the mountains along the border between his native Montenegro and the Serb-run part of Bosnia, while Gen Mladic is thought to be in Serbia proper.
Both men have, on occasion, been reported to take holidays on the Montenegrin coast around the town of Budva, accompanied by heavily armed bodyguards.
Montenegrin officials deny the reports, but were at a loss to explain how Vlastimir Djordjevic - who is charged with crimes against humanity for his part in a Serb crackdown on Kosovo's separatist rebels in 1998-1999 - turned up in the resort.
Carla del Ponte, the UN's top prosecutor for former Yugoslavia, said yesterday that his discovery there was made all the more galling by his choice of pseudonym - Karadzic.
"The fact that Djordjevic was able to hide in Montenegro during a long time without being detected, and with the false name of Karadzic, is something that must be solved," Ms del Ponte said after meeting Montenegrin president Filip Vujanovic.
"Let us see how many Karadzics live in Montenegro, and maybe we can find the real one," she added.
Events leading up to the arrest of Gen Djordjevic in Budva remain deeply mysterious. The UN tribunal had believed he was hiding in Russia, and his discovery in Budva came just a few days after a visit to Montenegro by Sergei Lebedev, the head of Russia's spy agency, the FIS. Russian and Montenegrin officials insist this was just a coincidence.
