BELGRADE (AFP) – Serbian police yesterday launched a probe into the alleged brutal beating of drug addicts at a rehabilitation center, as the national ombudsman filed charges against nine people in the facility. “Police and inspectors from the Health Ministry were in the center, conducted interviews there and will submit a report to the prosecution,” a police source told AFP. The investigation was launched after the private Vreme’s weekly’s website www. vreme. com aired a video showing some men savagely beating an inmate in a dining room of the center in the country’s south. Serbia’s ombudsman Sasa Jankovic yesterday filed charges against at least nine people from the center following the broadcast and said he had received similar complaints from former inmates. “I am bringing charges against nine people that we have identified based on the video broadcast but also on statements of several citizens who called my office during the day and reported their experience,” Jankovic told AFP. The nine are accused of “illegal detention, causing serious injuries and quackery,” Jankovic said, adding that the video broadcast clearly showed “it could not be a treatment or therapy.” The center is being run by a Serbian Orthodox priest, Branislav Peranovic, who confirmed that violence was used to cure drug addicts.

THE HAGUE (AFP) – The contempt trial of a former spokeswoman for the UN’s Yugoslav war crimes court will take place next month, the tribunal said yesterday. “Trial proceedings will... take place from Monday, June 15, 2009 to Wednesday, June 17,” the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia said in a scheduling order. Florence Hartmann, a French national, was to have stood trial in February for allegedly having divulged confidential information in the trial of late Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic. The case was postponed when she filed a motion for the disqualification of two judges, who were later replaced. Hartmann, also a former journalist, declined to plead when she first appeared before the tribunal in November last year, prompting the presiding judge to enter a plea of not guilty on her behalf. The spokeswoman of former ICTY prosecutor Carla del Ponte from 2000 to 2006, Hartmann was charged in August with two counts of contempt of the tribunal.

BELGRADE (Reuters) – Serbian authorities must improve the security of the country’s key officials, Interior Minister Ivica Dacic said yesterday, a day after a man threatened to blow himself up at the president’s office. Dragan Maric, 57, a disgruntled bankrupt businessman armed with two hand grenades was disarmed by police on Thursday after he had threatened to blow himself up at the entrance to the office of President Boris Tadic. “This means we have to look at security procedures more seriously,” Dacic said in an interview broadcast by Belgrade’s B92 TV. Maric has been placed in police detention, pending charges by the public prosecutor. Maric, who previously staged a hunger strike demanding an out-of-the court settlement to a property dispute, had given multiple warnings that he would carry out an attack.

A member of Bosnia’s three-person presidency says he has requested that war crimes charges be filed against two wartime Serbian presidents who were in command of the Yugoslav Army when it attacked Bosnia. Zeljko Komsic, the Croat member of the Bosnian presidency, said yesterday he had asked the state prosecutor to charge former Serbian presidents Dobrica Cosic and Zoran Lilic. He said the request was an answer to arrest warrants issued by Serbia for 19 former Bosnian officials who led an attack on a Yugoslav army convoy in 1992 in Sarajevo in which 40 soldiers were reportedly killed. (AP)

Former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic is appealing to the United Nations for documents that could underpin a motion calling on the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal to drop all charges against him. Karadzic has asked for correspondence or statements by UN members supporting his claim that American peace envoy Richard Holbrooke was acting with the world body’s authority in 1996 when he allegedly promised Karadzic immunity from prosecution if he relinquished power. Holbrooke denies making such a deal. Karadzic’s lawyers plan to ask the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal to dismiss the 11-count indictment against him because of the alleged agreement. The request was dated May 11 and published yesterday. (AP)