Serbia's response to Croatia's arguments to Serbia's counter-lawsuit is completed, material is in the print and it will be submitted to the ICJ on 4 November - the last day of the deadline for the reply, the daily learned form the source in the Serbian government.

Serbia's submission will most probably have over a thousand pages, after which the ICJ will give additional time to Zagreb to study the new arguments and possibly reply and then it will schedule a hearing, the daily said.

According to the daily, Serbia has several arguments for which it believes would stand good chance in the proceedings before the ICJ. One of its strongest arguments is the non-final verdict handed down by the UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague against Croatian generals Ante Gotovina and Mladen Markac for war crimes committed during and in the aftermath of Operation Storm.

The daily said that the Serbian legal team discovered more than 300 omissions on the list of victims sent from Zagreb, while Croatia had only about a dozen objections to the Serbian list of victims.

The daily also cited the State Secretary at the Serbian Justice Ministry, Slobodan Homen, as saying that Serbia was still prepared to resolve all issues with its neighbours through dialogue and that "the balls are now in Croatia's court."

Serbia's legal representatives filed the suit against Croatia at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague on Monday for genocide of Serbs during Croatia's 1991-95 Homeland War. The lawsuit was Serbia's response to the genocide suit Croatia had filed with the ICJ on 2 July 1999 against the then Yugoslavia.