Serbian authorities are negotiating with Bosnian Serb war crimes fugitive Ratko Mladic about surrendering to the UN war crimes court, Dutch Foreign Minister Ben Bot said this afternoon.
'I understand that negotiations are ongoing,' Bot told parliament.
The Dutch minister, who visited Belgrade this week, said that his Serbian interlocutors had told him there were talks with Mladic.
Bot's comments came after days of media reports in Serbia that Mladic, who is wanted for genocide for the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, had been arrested or was negotiating his surrender.
Those reports were denied by both the Serbian government and UN war crimes prosecutor Carla Del Ponte.
Mladic is accused of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity for his role in the bloody 1992-95 war in Bosnia.
He and the Bosnian Serbs' wartime political leader Radovan Karadzic are the most wanted fugitives indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.
Mladic is believed to be hiding in Serbia although Belgrade, which is under mounting pressure to arrest him, denies that.
The European Union threatened earlier to suspend integration talks with Serbia-Montenegro over lack of cooperation with The Hague tribunal.
It warned Serbia and Montenegro that stabilisation and association talks, the first step to EU membership, could be 'disrupted' due to its failure to apprehend war crimes fugitives.
