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Ratko Mladic during conflicts in the 90s | Photo: Beta

Branislav Puhalo, the former chief of Ratko Mladic’s security team and a witness in the case against Mladic’s accomplices, said at the trial on Wednesday that the 30th Personnel Centre of the Yugoslav Army, was instructed, at different periods, “by someone at the top” to guard Mladic.

Puhalo claims that when Mladic arrived in Serbia in 1997, the then Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic ordered the Army Chief at the time, Momcilo Perisic, to form the 30th Personnel Centre, the aim of which was to provide security for Mladic.

The Centre consisted of ex members of the Army of Republika Srpska and it was disbanded on March 31, 2002, two years after Milosevic lost power.

“The Serbian top state leadership knew that the soldiers in the military barracks at Topcider were there to guard Mladic from the bounty hunters. And there were a lot of them at that time,” said Puhalo.

He added that the soldiers received their salaries from the Yugoslav Army and that ”none of this could have been carried out without the knowledge of the President, the Defence Ministry and Army Headquarters.”

“It was all legal. We had several vehicles, around 20 rocket launchers, boxes of ammunition. General Mladic moved freely around Belgrade in 2001. We went to football matches, to police stations, to restaurants,” explained Puhalo, adding that the authorities could have arrested Mladic at any time if they had wanted to.

After 2000, when the democratic coalition came to power, the Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic and President Vojislav Kostunica both claimed that they had no information about Mladic’s whereabouts and that it was unlikely that he was in Serbia.

Mladic had been on the run from the Hague Tribunal, which has charged him with genocide in Srebrenica, for 16 years. He was arrested on May 26 in 2011, in the village of Lazarevo in Vojvodina.

This is the second trial of the ten people accused of hiding Mladic. The verdict from 2010 that acquitted them was quashed and the case sent for re-trial.

Finding out how Mladic was able to hide for so long is one of the requests that were lodged with the Serbian authorities by the current chief prosecutor at the Hague Tribunal, Serge Brammerz.

One of the accused, the former Yugoslav Army officer Jovo Djogo, passed away during the first trial.

The remaining accused have all pleaded not guilty.