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Prosecutor may drop some Mladic charges to speed case

Wed, 19 Oct 2011 15:30 GMT

Source: reuters // Reuters

THE HAGUE, Oct 19 (Reuters) - The Yugoslavia tribunal's prosecutor may drop some accusations against ailing Bosnian Serb general Ratko Mladic to speed up his trial, after judges rejected a bid to accelerate the prosecution by splitting the case in two.

Mladic, 69, was arrested in May and transferred to The Hague after 16 years on the run. He is accused of genocide for orchestrating the killing of 8,000 Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica in 1995 and for his role in the 43-month siege of Sarajevo in which 10,000 people were killed.

Mladic has suffered health problems, and prosecutors have raised concerns about him holding up for the duration of such a long and complex case. They are mindful that former Yugoslav strongman Slobodan Milosevic spent four years on trial but died in 2006 before a verdict could be reached.

To speed up the prosecution, they sought to split the indictment into two separate, smaller cases, but a panel of judges rejected that request last week.

Prosecutor Serge Brammertz said on Wednesday his team would now look at reducing the number of incidents on the charge sheet to shorten the trial, and would not appeal against the ruling that blocked splitting the case.

"We are not going to appeal," Brammertz told a group of reporters in The Hague. "We are exploring other possibilities."

"We are not looking to drop an entire component of the indictment, but to reduce individual components."

As an example, he said some of the incidents alleged to have taken place during the 1992-95 siege of Sarajevo could be dropped from the indictment.

Prosecutors have previously reduced the indictment against Mladic's political chief, former Bosnian Serb president Radovan Karadzic, who is also on trial at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague. (Reporting By Ivana Sekularac; Editing by Peter Graff)