Hague Tribunal

There were 400 reservist police officers in Visegrad before the war, and the force was multi-ethnic. However, as the conflict began, 183 more officers were recruited by the Serb-run police station in the town.

A number of them had criminal records, said Huso Kurspahic, the former commander of the police station in Medjedja, near Visegrad.

Djordjevic, a law graduate, joined the police and rose to the position of assistant minister at the Serbian Interior Ministry in September 1996. The following year, he was made a colonel-general, which was the highest rank at the time.

Bosnian state presidency member Zeljko Komsic on Tuesday strongly condemned the recent destruction of a memorial to Croats killed during the war in 1992 in the village of Brisevo in the Prijedor area, which lies in the country's Serb-dominated Republika Srpska entity.

Aleksandar Vucic told the Serbian parliament on Monday evening that "there is no evidence of who committed the murder" of Ylli, Agron, and Mehmet Bytyqi - US citizens of Albanian origin who were killed in Serbia in 1999.

Vucic said that without evidence, no one be arrested based "only on media reports and lawyers' claims", because "Serbia is a serious state".

In their letter to Aleksandar Vucic on Monday, the family of the Albanian-American Bytyqi brothers said that they are confident that Vlastimir Djordjevic has vital information that can help locate mass graves and urged the Serbian president and government to press him to disclose the information.

According to the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals (IRMCT) the two Radicals and members of the Serbian National Assembly, are supposed to be put on trial in The Hague, on charges of contempt of court, relating to the previous trial of their party leader, Vojislav Seselj.

A spokesperson for Angela Merkel said on Wednesday that the German Chancellor was not familiar with the nationalist song that was performed at the Croatian Democratic Union rally that she attended on Saturday, and was not informed about the content of the event's musical programme in advance.

Kosovo is planning to call on the international community to establish a special international tribunal that would judge crimes committed by Serbs during the war in Kosovo - but experts told BIRN that it is almost impossible that such a proposal will be successful.

Goran Saric's lawyer said on Wednesday that he is suing Bosnia and Herzegovina for 43,000 Bosnian marks (22,000 euros) in damages over the prohibitive restrictions imposed on him while he was on trial and the mental distress he suffered.

Serbian Radical Party MP Vjerica Radeta told BIRN that she and her party colleague Petar Jojic will not go to the The Hague voluntarily to face trial for contempt of court, despite the latest ruling by the UN's Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals.