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Thu, 2 Jun 2011 14:09 GMT

Source: reuters // Reuters

A 2006 U.S. cable quotes del Ponte on the former police director of the Serb Republic Dragomir Andan: "He was undoubtedly in close relationship (including personal) with ICTY fugitive Ratko Mladic."

Andan has been in The Hague in recent days as a defence witness in a different war crimes case and could not be reached for comment. Lajcak, the international envoy in Sarajevo with the power to fire officials and negate laws, dismissed Andan and barred him from public office.

Some experts also saw links between Mladic and officials around Milorad Dodik, the current president of the Serb Republic half of Bosnia who has been the dominant Bosnian Serb politician in recent years. "The people who work for Mladic are now basically running Dodik's security operations," an official close to the hunt for Mladic in Bosnia told Reuters in 2008. "They are all former members of the so-called 410th military intelligence centre of the Bosnian Serb Army which was raided and shut down - in 2003.

"These people have connections to the Mladic support network even today."

Dodik's office said such allegations were "hideous lies" coming from political circles in Sarajevo. "Such information does not correspond with the truth and falls into the domain of speculation," Dodik's office said in a statement. "The truth is that in Milorad Dodik's security no one works or has ever worked who has been connected in any way with Ratko Mladic and the 410th centre of the Serb Republic Army."

In recent days Dodik has expressed support for those who have demonstrated against Mladic's arrest and said he would help raise funds to help pay Mladic's legal fees.

NEGOTIATING HIS SURRENDER

Bosnian Serbs in Serbia proper were also a factor. Lazarevo, the village about 100 km (60 miles) from Belgrade where Mladic was found last week, is home to many Bosnian Serbs who resettled there after World War Two.

"We have established several directions that were expected to lead us to Mladic -- his former wartime comrades, a group of Bosnian Serbs residing in Serbia that were linked with him in the past and finally his family," Rasim Ljajic, who was in charge of Serbia's cooperation efforts with the international war crimes tribunal in the Hague, told Reuters.

Investigators got close to Mladic in 2006 when they arrested 10 people who had helped hide the general. One of those arrested who agreed to speak with Reuters said agents asked him to convince Mladic to surrender.

"When the secret service busted our network, I was approached by agents during the interrogation and asked to negotiate his surrender," the man said. "I was let out of the jail ... I managed to pass the message to the general who pondered it and then decided against it."

The helper returned to prison, and Mladic renewed his efforts to evade arrest even as his funds dwindled. Details about his whereabouts over the past five years are hard to confirm -- there are reports for example that he spent some time in a Serbian Orthodox monastery -- but security sources say he was hiding with the help of his wider family.

In 2008, Serbian authorities scored a major breakthrough when they apprehended Mladic's wartime political leader Radovan Karadzic, who was living openly in Belgrade. Karadzic had grown a long beard and reinvented himself as an alternative medicine guru.

Serbia's war crimes investigators ruled out such a transformation for a military man such as Mladic. "Karadzic ... was prone to public exposure and ... could not cope with anonymity," said war crimes cooperation official Ljajic.

IN A VILLAGE

Over the years, police received thousands of tips about Mladic's whereabouts which repeatedly came to nothing. Officials did not have particularly high hopes last week either.

In fact, some top Serbian officials related to the Mladic hunt were out of the country the day of his apprehension -- a contrast to the gathering of the U.S. president and his top officials awaiting news on the recent killing of Osama bin Laden.

"I am convinced they did not expect Mladic to be there that day," said one western official whose country has provided past technical hunt on the search. "It was not so much that they expected Mladic would actually be there, but it would have been part of the larger jigsaw puzzle."

A lead some years ago pointed to the farmhouse in Lazarevo, which is not far from the northeastern town of Zrenjanin. "A man called a while ago and asked to talk to me and said that in a village near Zrenjanin he saw a blue Volkswagen Golf with such-and-such registration plates and that he thought he saw Mladic inside," Ljajic said. "I gave all the information to security agencies which then continued to pursue the case. But the trail back then went cold."

Lazarevo quickly fell out of focus until recent months when investigators noticed that one of Mladic's suspected helpers made repeated calls and trips to the village, Ljajic said.

A security official familiar with the details of the Mladic hunt told Reuters that Mladic's son Darko had twice attended religious celebrations in the village in recent months.

"Electronic surveillance was the key. We have also reduced the number of operatives on the job to minimise the probability of leaks," he said.

That was an important point. Mladic's continued popularity in Serbia forced Serbian officials to limit the size of the team hunting him down. "They have been obviously hampered by not putting more than a certain number of people on the job," said the foreign official whose country provided assistance in the multi-year search. It was because "of the obvious risk of information getting into the wrong hands."

But Serbian investigators had enough suspicions to return to the farmhouse. His son's visits were key. "We increased monitoring of that suspect and he led us to the general."

SLOPPY ENDING

In the end, the man who once commanded armies was a solitary figure in a farmhouse annex.

"Mladic was living an ascetic life, he practically never left his hideaway, he seldom opened windows, the room was a mess with many medications and pills on a table," Ljajic said.

Said the foreign official: "The financial flow effectively was cut off at some point between 2006 and now, hence presumably the state in which he was found."

The general had boasted he would never be taken alive. But though he had two guns with him, he did not seek a heroic ending.

"He tried to back off away from the window when he saw someone entering the front yard, hoping police would focus on a house near that farmhouse where he was," Ljajic said. "Police entered that very farmhouse where he was, he approached them and handed over personal identity card with his name on which was expired. He did not try to conceal his identity."

His sloppy appearance during his arrest last Thursday suggested that he might be suffering from trouble with his bowels, said the security official, who did not want to be named.

After his arrest, the first thing Mladic asked about was his long unpaid general's pension, a security official said. His lawyer said Mladic has the right to collect 4.7 million dinars ($70,000) of unpaid pension and 90,000 dinars every month ($1,335) until his death. While he was in Belgrade detention, he had empowered his son to collect the funds.

In recent days, he has often spoken of his deceased daughter and said Yugoslav leader Milosevic was responsible for everything, the official added.

On Tuesday, Mladic arrived at what may become his final place of residence: a private, 15-sq-metre room with a single bed, TV and computer in the international war crimes detention centre in the Hague.

(Additional reporting by Aleksandar Vasovic; Editing by Simon Robinson, Mike Williams and Sara Ledwith)