BELGRADE, July 16 (AFP) - Former Croatian Serb rebel leader Goran Hadzic has been indicted by the Hague-based UN war crimes tribunal, Serbia-Montenegro Foreign Minister Vuk Draskovic said Friday.
Draskovic said the indictment was received by the foreign ministry on Tuesday and sent immediately to a local court under a law on cooperation with the International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia.
Details of the indictment were not immediately released but Hadzic, 45, has long been suspected of involvement in the murders of hundreds of non-Serbs in neighbouring eastern Croatia during that country's 1991-95 war.
He was the wartime president of the self-proclaimed Serb republic of Krajina, an area representing one-third of Croatia which was seized by rebel Serbs who opposed Croatia's independence from the former Yugoslav federation.
The Croatian Serbs' rebellion, which was backed by then Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic, was eventually crushed by Croatian forces in 1995 and the Serb republic was dissolved.
Hadzic has previously been mentioned in UN indictments as being part of a "joint criminal enterprise" with Milosevic, the top war crimes indictee currently on trial at The Hague.
Draskovic said Belgrade had been given 72 hours before the indictment was made public to allow for Hadzic's arrest.
But a police spokesman in the northern Serbian town of Novi Sad, where the suspect has lived since he fled Croatia at the end of the war, said there had been no orders to apprehend Hadzic.
Since he moved to Serbia, Hadzic, who has three children, has been employed as a senior adviser in state-owned oil company NIS.
Belgrade has refused to act on four other indictments issued last year against army and police generals for their part in the 1998-99 conflict in the southern Serbian province of Kosovo.
Serbia-Montenegro, a loose union of two highly autonomous Balkan republics, was formed early last year after Yugoslavia was formally dissolved.