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BELGRADE — Masked policemen scoured the Belgrade home of Ratko Mladic's son and four other sites in the capital on Thursday in an intensified hunt for the fugitive genocide suspect.
The elite anti-terrorist unit acted on an order from a Belgrade investigative judge and Serbia's war crimes prosecutors, who are trying to track down the former Bosnian Serb army commander, police said.
Dozens of police wearing bulletproof vests and masks and carrying machine guns stood guard in front of Darko Mladic's house in one of Belgrade's elite residential neighborhoods, while other officers searched inside.
The raid ended after about seven hours, with police impounding numerous documents, trophy arms and clothes they believe belong to Mladic, according to Dragan Todorovic, a nationalist Radical Party leader who was present as a witness during the search.
Mladic, a former general, is charged with genocide by the U.N. war crimes tribunal in The Hague, Netherlands. He is accused of orchestrating the 1995 massacre of 8,000 Muslims in Srebrenica — the worst carnage in Europe since World War II — and the armed siege of the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo, during the 1992-95 war.
Rasim Ljajic, the government official in charge of the search, said the authorities were looking for "clues, evidence, documents or anything that may lead us to Ratko Mladic."
He said the aim was also to cut the fugitive off from his financial support network. Authorities believe that Darko Mladic, a wealthy businessman, is his father's chief financier.
Ljajic said the search will continue until Mladic and another fugitive — former Croatian Serb leader Goran Hadzic — are caught. Police raids in the coming days will focus on other parts of Serbia, he said.
Serbia must arrest Mladic if it wants to move closer to European Union membership. Government officials have said recently that Serbia has stepped up the search for Mladic and Hadzic, who is charged by The Hague tribunal with 14 counts of war crime offenses.
Last month, the police searched a factory in central Serbia looking for potential clues to Mladic's whereabouts and the network financing him, but failed to locate the general.
In July, Serbia arrested Bosnian Serb wartime political leader Radovan Karadzic, also charged with genocide, and handed him over to The Hague.
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Associated Press writer Jovana Gec contributed to this report.
