A prominent lawyer who was on the defence team of former strongman Slobodan Milosevic at the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal has been shot and killed.

A police statement says Dragoslav Ognjanovic was killed late Saturday outside his home in the Serbian capital, Belgrade.

Mr Ognjanovic's 26-year-old son was wounded in his right arm, it added.

Mr Ognjanovic was part of the legal team that defended Milosevic at the UN tribunal in The Hague, Netherlands, where he was tried for war crimes of the Balkan wars of the 1990s.

Milosevic died of a heart attack in 2006 before his trial could be concluded.

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Over the years, Mr Ognjanovic also defended some of Serbia’s leading underworld figures.

Several prominent members of Serbian and Montenegrin organised crime networks have been killed in Belgrade in the past two years in what police describe as a turf war over the illegal drugs market.

In a joint statement, the heads of the Bar Association of Serbia and the Bar Association of Belgrade said the shooting of Ognjanovic was "the latest in a series of numerous attacks on lawyers."

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"[We will] exert maximum pressure on the competent state authorities in order to find the perpetrators of this crime in the shortest possible time," Viktor Gostiljac and Jugoslav Tintor said.

Serbian police say they are searching for the attacker.