BELGRADE, Serbia -- Serbian prosecutors charged six people Tuesday with helping a Bosnian Serb war crimes suspect avoid arrest, including by traveling to Russia under a false identity.
The legal action came as secret U.S. embassy cables were published saying Russia had not helped Serbia in locating another war crimes suspect -- Ratko Mladic, Europe's most wanted fugitive.
The war crimes prosecutors said Tuesday that the six Serbs are suspected of helping wartime police chief Stojan Zupljanin hide at 26 locations in Serbia before his arrest in June 2008.
The prosecutors' spokesman, Bruno Vekaric, said Zupljanin spent three months in Moscow while on the run between 2002-08. He also traveled to Paris and Lagos, Nigeria, with fake documents provided by the accused, Vekaric said.
Russia has become a refuge for many Serbs who are wanted for various crimes by their pro-Western government, including the wife and the son of former President Slobodan Milosevic.
Zupljanin is currently standing trial at the U.N. war crimes court in The Hague, Netherlands, on charges that he ran prison camps where thousands of non-Serbs were killed during Bosnia's 1992-95 war.
A Serbian court last week acquitted 10 men charged with helping Mladic, the former Bosnian Serb army commander, evade arrest for the U.N. tribunal's genocide charges. The Belgrade court said there was not enough evidence to convict the men.
The ruling was a blow to Serbia's efforts to show it is doing all it can to arrest Mladic, whom it must capture to advance its bid to join the European Union. Mladic is wanted by the U.N. court for orchestrating the massacre in 1995 of 8,000 Muslims in the Bosnian enclave of Srebrenica, and other atrocities of Bosnia's 1992-95 war.
A Belgrade daily quoted a former close aide of Mladic last month as saying the former general is probably hiding in Russia, where he has a lot of support from hard-liners in the military. There was no official reaction from Russia or Serbia to the report.
"According to our information, Mladic was in Belgrade until 2006," Serbian President Boris Tadic said Tuesday.
"We don't know where Ratko Mladic is now. If we knew, he would be arrested today."
According to a secret U.S. embassy cable published by the WikiLeaks website, Russia "has not been forthcoming on Serbia's requests for assistance in locating" Mladic. Both the Kremlin and the Russian Federal Security Service, or FSB, declined immediate comment.
The cable quotes Serbian presidential adviser Miki Rakic as saying in August 2009 that he believed "based on Mladic's profile that the former Bosnian Serb military commander was likely hiding in Serbia, possibly with assistance from foreign sources."
