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UN prosecutors believe a special team dedicated to tracking down suspected war criminals should be created to speed up the arrest of the suspects still at large in Bosnia, an official said on Wednesday.
"We are discussing a possible police force, although not one in charge of the arrests themselves... It would be a tracking team," Jean-Jacques Joris, political adviser to the chief prosecutor, told reporters.
Chief Prosecutor Carla del Ponte has been pressing NATO and the key members of the NATO-led Stabilisation Force (SFOR) for over a year to bring in the final war crimes suspects believed to be in the Bosnian Serb republic.
Some observers have suggested certain Western states are reluctant to seize the key figures at large, fearing the risk to their troops or possible revelations by the accused in court.
But Joris said this was not what Del Ponte had heard.
"The answer she gets is there is a political will to arrest the suspects, but that there are technical difficulties in locating them," he told a regular news briefing.
Del Ponte was in discussions with NATO and key SFOR member states about the possibility of creating a U.N.-controlled team to help in the hunt, Joris said.
International forces have arrested 20 of the 38 currently held at the tribunal's detention centre in The Hague, but the pace of those arrests has slowed considerably in the past 12 months.
SFOR troops seized Bosnian Serb commander Dragan Obrenovic, accused of killing thousands of Muslims during the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, in mid-April. However, Obrenovic's arrest was the first by SFOR since last June.
Of those publicly indicted, Bosnian Serb wartime leader Radovan Karadzic and his military commander Ratko Mladic are among the tribunal's most wanted men.
Karadzic and leading politician Milan Martic, accused of the 1995 Zagreb bombing, are believed still to be in Bosnia's Serb Republic, along with 10 or more others.
The tribunal says a total of 26 suspects remain at large, although an unknown number are included on indictments which are kept secret. Obrenovic, the man most recently arrested, was on one such sealed indictment.
© Reuters
