Nato troops have carried out searches in Bosnia's Serb Republic today, a day after the West's peace envoy sacked 60 senior Serb officials for failure to arrest top war crimes fugitive Radovan Karadzic.
A spokesman for the Nato-led Stabilisation Force (SFOR) in Bosnia declined to say whether the force, backed by local police, was searching for war crimes suspects in the eastern town of Han Pijesak.
The small town lies in an area where wartime Bosnian Serb military chief Ratko Mladic, also indicted by the UN tribunal in The Hague, was rumoured to be hiding after the 1992-95 war.
"We are conducting a search operation in Han Pijesak focused on a facility, as part of our normal framework operation to ensure compliance with the Dayton peace agreement," the SFOR spokesman said, referring to the accord that ended the war.
SFOR, which have 7,000 troops in Bosnia, often carry out similar searches in Bosnia, which is divided into a Serb republic and a Muslim-Croat federation.