Ratko Mladic, the former Bosnian Serb general charged with orchestrating the murder of tens of thousands of Balkan Muslims, has been ruled fit for extradition to face international justice after the capture that ended his 16 years as a fugitive.
Brought before a special Belgrade court a day after being arrested in a dawn raid on a country cottage north-east of the Serbian capital, Mladic dismissed the 15 counts of genocide and war crimes against him, while his lawyer and family insisted he was too ill to be extradited for trial at the UN war crimes tribunal in the Hague. They asked for him to be hospitalised in Belgrade and treated by a team of Russian doctors.
Following a medical examination, however, the Belgrade judge ruled that the 69-year-old was fit to be transferred to the Yugoslav tribunal in The Hague. The judge gave Mladic three days to appeal. Bruno Vekaric, a Serbian war crimes prosecutor, said the extradition could be completed within a week. A panel of judges is expected to hear the appeal on Monday before the Serbian justice minister decides whether to put Mladic on a flight to the Netherlands.
Doctors, family, lawyers and a Serbian government minister went on Friday to the detention unit where Mladic. They talked to the genocide suspect, who is said to have been in robust form when questioned on Thursday.
Brusquely rejecting the charges against him, he turned on Vekaric, made rude remarks about his beard and refused to sign a statement. Mladic was put on suicide watch and had medicines and his spectacles taken away.
"Are you frightened I'm going to kill myself? Mladic won't do Mladic," he told his guards, according to the Belgrade newspaper Blic quoting court sources.
His son, Darko Mladic, said after visiting the suspect twice on Friday: "His stand is that he's not guilty of what he's being accused of.
"He has received a medical examination and is under medical observation, but we think that's not enough because of his condition. From what we saw his state of health is worrying. We are demanding that he be transferred to hospital and we want a team of doctors from Russia."
His son added that the doctors had evidence of two strokes. The court spokesman, Maja Kovacevic, agreed Mladic was ill but said he was capable of understanding the proceedings and was fit to go to The Hague, where medical treatment would be available.
As details began to emerge of the operation to seize Mladic, questions were being asked about why the Serbian authorities, under intense international pressure, had taken so long to locate him.
Ivica Dacic, the Serbian interior minister, said Mladic had been living for years in the small Vojvodina village of Lazarevo, north-east of Belgrade.
Dacic said that when a special police unit seized Mladic early on Thursday and asked him to identify himself, he replied: "Congratulations, you've found who you are looking for."
On Friday in the Serbian half of Bosnia, protests at the arrest began to multiply. Posters of Mladic with the slogan "Serbs arise" appeared across Banja Luka, the Bosnian Serb capital, and demonstrations were announced in Pale and Han Pijesak, the wartime political and military headquarters of Mladic and Radovan Karadzic, also being tried on genocide charges.
The Mladic arrest is seen as a coup for Serbia's President Boris Tadic, who pressed the European Union to reward him by naming a date for starting talks on Serbia's membership. But in what is seen as a missed opportunity, Tadic is boycotting a summit of east European leaders with Barack Obama because the president of Kosovo, which Belgrade refuses to recognise as independent, will be there.
