The international war-crimes prosecutor, Ms Louise Arbour, yesterday repeated her belief that President Slobodan Milosevic will be tried for crimes in Kosovo.
Speaking to a press conference in Pristina, Ms Arbour said indictments against Mr Milosevic for mass deportation and murder of Kosovars were backed up by corroborative evidence on the ground and that the process was "irreversible".
Ms Arbour, chief prosecutor for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), said it was almost impossible to eradicate all evidence of war crimes.
On her first visit to Kosovo in January Ms Arbour was refused entry by the Serb authorities.
"Milosevic thought that he could keep me out of Kosovo, but I believe that he can't keep himself out of The Hague," she said yesterday.
The UN war crimes tribunal yesterday declined to comment on a report that the Serbian paramilitary leader Arkan, whose real name is Mr Zeljko Raznatovic, was seeking to negotiate his surrender for trial via Belgian intermediaries.
Quoting a Brussels prosecutor, a US television station, MSNBC, reported Arkan had contacted Belgium to explore the possibility of turning himself in to the international tribunal.
The tribunal revealed in March that it had charged Arkan with crimes against humanity for his alleged part in some of the bloodiest atrocities in the Balkans.
Arkan's feared Tiger militia is widely reported to have participated alongside the Yugoslav army in the siege of Vukovar in 1991. The British Defence Secretary, Mr George Robertson, has said Arkan
is accused of the massacre of 250 men taken from Vukovar hospital after the town's surrender. Arkan is also widely reported to have been active in the Bosnian war.
The British Foreign Secretary, Mr Robin Cook, said yesterday that the bodies of 11 children shot dead at close range had been found by British forensic teams working in Kosovo.
The children, seven girls and four boys, aged between two and 16, were found in the village of Celine in the south-west of the province.
The Minister for Defence, Mr Smith, reviewed the latest contingent of Irish troops bound for peacekeeping duty in Bosnia at a ceremony at McKee Barracks yesterday. An advance party of the 50strong unit leaves tomorrow, with the remainder flying out next Sunday.