It would be "absolutely outrageous" for any country to offer refuge to Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, indicted for crimes against ethnic Albanians in Kosovo, the deputy prosecutor at the UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague has said. Mr Graham Blewitt said giving shelter to Mr Milosevic would be a breach of international law. The tribunal has issued an international arrest warrant for the Yugoslav president and four accused Yugoslav and Serbian officials.
Greek media had reported that China has offered refuge to the Yugoslav leader. Earlier Greek media claimed that the US was looking for a place of refuge for Mr Milosevic. Both countries are permanent members of the Security Council, the parent body of the tribunal.
Mr Blewitt was speaking as four Bosnian Serbs went on trial accused of torturing and murdering Muslim and Croat civilians at prison camps during the Bosnian war. The four, Mr Miroslav Kvocka (43), Mr Milojica Kos (36), Mr Mlado Radic (47) and Mr Zoran Zigic are together charged with 17 counts of crimes against humanity and war crimes for atrocities committed in three prison camps in the Prijedor region of northwestern Bosnia during the spring and summer of 1992.
"The evidence presented at this trial will prove that the accused and others under their authority confined, beat, tortured, sexually assaulted and murdered many of the Bosnian and Croat detainees ... solely because of the victims' ethnicity," a prosecutor, Mr Grant Niemann, said in an opening statement.
He showed the court video clips of emaciated detainees at the Omarska camp, a former mining complex.
"The images of skeletal malnutrition at the Prijedor prison camps sent shock waves around the world," Mr Niemann said.
Three of the accused were commanders at the Omarska camp. Mr Kvocka served as overall commander and later as deputy commander while Mr Kos and Mr Radic were shift commanders at the camp. Mr Zigic entered the Omarska, Keraterm and Trnopolje camps to rape, torture and kill prisoners, prosecutors allege.
The indictment picks out one instance where Mr Zigic severely beat two men over a period of days, then forced them to jump from a truck, lie on broken glass and have sex with other prisoners. The two victims died several days later. Mr Niemann said the acts of cruelty were not random.
"This trial is about a government policy of persecution and ethnic cleansing. The crime was on a massive scale," he said.
A handful of "ethnocentric, fanatical nationalists" seized power in Prijedor, regarded as a strategic corridor, and sought to permanently remove, or "ethnically cleanse", Muslims and Croats in order to forge a Serb nation, Mr Niemann said.
About 6,000 civilians were rounded up and held in the camps. "At a minimum, hundreds of prisoners, whose identities are known and unknown, did not survive the camps," the indictment says.
By June 1993, the Muslim population of about 49,000 had been reduced to an estimated 6,000, prosecutors say.
President Jacques Chirac of France will visit the tribunal today and meet the president, chief prosecutor and registrar. France has agreed to put its prisons at the disposal of the tribunal. It is the sixth country where convicted war criminals will be able to serve their sentences. Italy, Norway, Finland, Sweden and Austria have also made such a commitment.