[JURIST] Five hundred Bosnian police officers launched an ultimately unsuccessful operation on Wednesday near the town of Han Pijesak in an failed attempt to find and arrest either Radovan Karadzic [BBC profile] or Ratko Mladic [BBC profile], both of whom are accused of genocide [ICTY case backgrounder]. At a news conference, a spokesman for the police acknowledged that the target of the raid was either Karadzic or Mladic, but refused to specify which suspect they believed to be in the area, saying only that the "suspect we were looking for was not found." Both Karadzic, a former political leader in Bosnia, and his army chief Mladic face charges for war crimes [JURIST news archive] levied by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia [official website] for their alleged role in the 1995 massacre of 8,000 Muslim men and boys in the eastern enclave of Srebrenica during the siege of Sarajevo. Earlier this month, a NATO official called on Serbia and Bosnia [JURIST report] to step up their efforts to find the wanted war criminals and a European Union official confiscated funds [JURIST report] from the still active Serb Democratic Party (SDS) because Karadzic, its founder, remains at large. AP has more.
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