Serbia Working With Western Spies To Get Mladic

The Netherlands has refused to back Serbia`s bid to join the European Union until Mladic is arrested.

Serbia is working closely with Western spy agencies to find the country's most wanted war crimes suspect Ratko Mladic, but still does not know where he is, the Balkan country's interior minister said on Monday.

The Netherlands has refused to back Serbia's bid to join the European Union until Mladic is arrested.

Interior Minister Ivica Dacic, also head of the Socialist Party once led by Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic, said Mladic and another fugitive, Goran Hadzic, were "serving as an excuse for blackmailing Serbia".

"We have cooperated well with foreign services in locating war crimes fugitives," Dacic told Reuters. "Some of the searches we mounted over the past several years were based on data provided by foreign intelligence, but this data proved wrong."

Dacic said Serbian authorities remained determined to put an end to the war crimes affair.

"We are checking information about their helpers," Dacic said. "The two should surrender peacefully as the country is now their virtual hostage."

Mladic, former commander of Bosnian Serb troops during the 1992-1995 war, is sought by the U.N. war crimes court for the former Yugoslavia for the 1995 massacre of about 8,000 Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica and for the 43-month siege of Sarajevo.

TOPPLING MILOSEVIC

Hadzic is indicted for crimes against humanity committed in Croatia between 1991 and 1995.

Milosevic, himself indicted for war crimes in the 1990s, died in 2006 while on trial at the U.N. court in The Hague.

Last year, Dacic's Socialists entered a government coalition led by the Democrats, Milosevic's arch enemies who masterminded his ouster, arrest and handover to the U.N. court in 2001.

Dacic, a former spokesman and top ally of Milosevic, said his party had shed most of the ex-leader's legacy and policies that fomented a bloody breakup of the former Yugoslavia.

"We cannot change the past, but we can change the present and the future ... we are now more European than some parties that took part in toppling Milosevic," he said.

Last July, Dacic made a fresh start as the chief of Serbian police by intensifying the struggle against corruption and cross-border organised crime. Serbian police have detained dozens on suspicion of large-scale drug trafficking, high-profile underworld killings, fraud and money laundering.