"It is unquestionable that the army protected Ratko Mladic, but I don't know if it is protecting him today. The Guard Brigade was the stronghold and last bastion of the regime and sympathisers of Slobodan Milosevic. Members of the Guard Brigade remained loyal to Milosevic like the Taliban. That is true and nobody can dispute that fact, but I do not know who is the Guard Brigade security chief," Batic said.
According to the daily, a former head of the public relations office of the late Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic, Vladimir Popovic Beba, said Mladic was at the Belgrade-based Topcider barracks and that his personal bodyguard over the past ten years had been Lt. Colonel Branislav Puhac, who is also the Serbian Army Guard Brigade's Chief of Security.
"It is no secret that the army is protecting Mladic. They were protecting him even when we were in power. We had information that the army protected and controlled Mladic. Even Nebojsa Pavkovic (former Serbia-Montenegro Army Chief of Staff) confirmed it indirectly saying: 'A month ago we confiscated his passes', but he has remained under their control," Popovic told the daily. He added that the then government failed to react to that information because allegedly the then president of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, Vojislav Kostunica, was against it.