By Aleksandar Vasovic BELGRADE, June 8 (Reuters) - Serbia's war crimes prosecutor has launched a probe into the role of journalists in stoking war crimes during 1991-1995 wars in the former Yugoslavia, an official said on Monday. The Special War Crime Prosecutor's office plans to focus on links between war-mongering reporting and 1991-92 atrocities in the Croatian and Bosnian towns of Vukovar and Zvornik. "We have found examples of war-mongering in the then media," Bruno Vekaric, spokesman for the Serbian war crimes prosecutor's office, told Reuters. "We now have war crime sentences ... we can now link causes (for crimes) and consequences." In March, Serbia's war crimes court sentenced 13 former Serb paramilitaries for the 1991 massacre of 200 Croats at a pig farm near Croatia's eastern town of Vukovar. Last year the court also sentenced three former Serb paramilitaries for their role in the 1992 killings of 25 Muslims from the eastern Bosnian town of Zvornik. During the outbreak of Yugoslav wars, a number of reporters, loyal to the now-defunct regime of late autocrat Slobodan Milosevic, were active in flamboyant reporting about events in Croatia and Bosnia. "We have found examples of war mongering ... our goal is to find sufficient evidence for indictments," Vekaric said. Investigators will "have difficulties to prove intentional stoking of war crimes" in actual reports, he said. "Our key goal is to warn that such things must never repeat." Serbia still has to arrest two remaining war crime fugitives, former Bosnian Serb commander Ratko Mladic and Goran Hadzic, political leader of Serbs in Croatia and extradite them to the U.N. war crimes court in the Netherlands. Mladic, sought for genocide during the 1992-1995 war in Bosnia is believed to be hiding in Serbia. Authorities in Belgrade have said they had no information about Hadzic's whereabouts and media reports suggested he might be hiding in Russia. Cooperation with the Hague tribunal is vital for Serbia's bid to win access to European Union's trade preferentials, an early step towards implementing a pre-accession accord. Serbia hopes to become an EU member candidate in 2010. (Reporting by Aleksandar Vasovic; Editing by Gordana Filipovic)
Tamil supporters demonstrate outside the grounds during the ICC World Twenty20 warm-up cricket match between Sri Lanka and South Africa at Lord's Cricket Ground in London June 3 2009. REUTERS/Philip Brown ...
