Serbia's President Boris Tadic on Thursday confirmed that earlier in the day, Ratko Mladic, who was on the run for years and who is wanted for war crimes by the ICTY tribunal, had been arrested in Serbia.
The Serbian police on Thursday morning arrested a man under the name of Milorad Komadic, believed to be Ratko Mladic, a wartime Serb military commander.
Upon his arrest his identity was checked.
After that President Tadic held an emergency news conference to announce Mladic's apprehension.
The 69-year-old Ratko Mladic is charged by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) with genocide and other war crimes committed against Bosnian Muslim and Croats during the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
In 1995, the ICTY issued an indictment against Mladic and the wartime Bosnian Serb political leader Radovan Karadzic for war genocide and crimes committed between 1991 and 1993 and later that year it issued a new indictment against them for genocide in Srebrenica where several thousand Bosnian Muslims were killed when that eastern Bosnian enclave fell into the hand of the Serb forces in mid-July 1995.
The two indictments were united into one document in 2002 in which Mladic and Karadzic are indicted on charges of genocide, complicity in genocide, persecutions, extermination and murder, deportation and inhumane acts, unlawfully inflicting terror upon civilians, murder, cruel treatment, attacks on civilians, taking of hostages.
The cases were separated after the arrest of Karadzic in Serbia on 21 July 2008 and his transfer to The Hague where his trial before the ICTY commenced in October 2009.
According to the media, Mladic was nabbed 80 kilometres northeast of Belgrade.
