In a message from his UN prison cell in the Netherlands, former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic says he is saddened by the arrest of his wartime ally Ratko Mladic on Thursday.

“President Karadzic is sorry for General Mladic’s loss of freedom and he looks forward to working with him to bring out the truth about what happened in Bosnia,” said Karadzic's American lawyer Peter Robinson.

The lawyer called The Associated Press to relay the message shortly after visiting Karadzic in a detention unit in The Hague where the two men accused of masterminding Europe's worst war crimes since World War II will soon be reunited.

Worst atrocity since World War II
Mladic was Karadzic's military chief during the 1992-1995 Bosnian ethnic war that cost an estimated 100,000 lives.

Both have been indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia for genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes during the 1995 massacre of some 7,500 Muslim men and boys in the UN-protected Srebrenica enclave in eastern Bosnia – the worst single atrocity in Europe since World War II. Mladic is also wanted in connection with the four-year siege of Sarajevo.

Extradition to The Hague
Mladic’s arrest after 16 years on the run has been hailed internationally. He lived freely in the Serbian capital Belgrade for a while, before disappearing after the arrest of former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic in 2001. 

Mladic now faces the same procedure as Karadzic underwent three years ago after he was arrested on a Belgrade bus. He will first undergo Serbian extradition procedures before he can be flown to The Hague to face the UN war crimes tribunal. There, he will be taken directly to the tribunal's detention unit in a wing of a Dutch jail close to the North Sea coast, the same unit that Karadzic has called home since 2008.

(jn/dd)

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