Indictments issued by the International Criminal Tribunal against Mr Milosevic will soon be widened to include charges of genocide for war crimes committed in Bosnia and Croatia, its senior prosecutor said in Kosovo yesterday.
"Yes, we are working very hard to come out soon with other indictments against Milosevic, of genocide with relation to Bosnia and Croatia," Ms Carla del Ponte told a press conference in Pristina.
Mr Milosevic is currently indicted for war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in Kosovo during 1998-99.
The expected new indictment would take into account killings by Serbian forces during the siege of Vukovar in 1991, the shelling of the Adriatic town of Dubrovnik during the Bosnian war, and massacre of an estimated 7,000 Bosnian Muslim civilians around the town of Srebrenica in 1995.
Ms del Ponte was speaking at the end of a tour of the Balkans which coincided with the popular uprising in Belgrade.
"The message I am giving to Dr Kostunica is that I am prepared to receive Milosevic in The Hague at any time . . . It's the only solution for true and lasting peace in the Balkans," she said. "I'm surprised and delighted at the events in Belgrade. . . and I'm prepared to visit Belgrade to discuss with the opposition," she added.
Ms del Ponte said part of the purpose of her trip to Bosnia had been to press for the indictment of all fugitives named by The Hague, especially Dr Radovan Karazdic and Gen Ratko Mladic.
"I want to have knowledge of what was done to locate the fugitives," she said, commenting on the obstacles to arresting Gen Mladic and Dr Karazdic.
British, US and French NATO special forces are understood to have formulated plans to arrest suspected war criminals hiding inside the NATO-controlled area in Bosnia, although fears of casualties are thought to have put any possible operations on hold.
The ICTY has been exhuming the bodies of ethnic Albanians and some Serbs killed in Kosovo during the ethnic cleansing which ended with NATO's bombing campaign in June 1999.
Ms del Ponte said forensic investigations in Kosovo would end this month, adding that it was too early for her teams to estimate the total number of corpses exhumed. "I will say, however, that the number of victims is in excess of 4,000."