My office has no such intention, Brammertz said on Wednesday when answering questions at a news conference whether the prosecutors in the Mladic case would amend the indictment so as to include the responsibility of Mladic, a former high-ranking officer of the Yugoslav People's Army (JNA), for war crimes in Croatia, notably the 18 November 1991 Skabrnja massacre.
In 1992, the Sibenik court sentenced Mladic in absentia to 20 years in prison for war crimes against civilians in the Croatian villages of Kijevo and Vrlika. He was also charged with artillery attacks which JNA units under his command carried out against civilian targets in Sibenik and Zadar and their surroundings and with shelling of Pozaga from Serb position in Bosnia. He was held responsible for ordering the destruction of the Peruca dam and hydro power plant.
Brammertz convened the news conference in The Hague today after Serbia extradited Mladic to the ICTY on Tuesday morning.
The chief prosecutor welcomed Mladic's arrest, after he had evaded justice for 16 years, as a big step for international justice, adding that the forthcoming trial must meet the expectations.
Brammertz praised Serbia's President Boris Tadic and state authorities for capturing Mladic on 26 May.
He however insists that the Serbian authorities should establish who helped Mladic while in hiding for those years and punish them.
Brammertz said that the pressure from the international community, notably the policy of making Serbia's European Union prospects conditional on the arrest of fugitive war criminals, were very helpful for the apprehension of Mladic.
The ICTY prosecutor said that he expected the capture of the sole remaining fugitive war crimes suspect, Croatian Serb rebel leader Goran Hadzic, who is indicted for war crimes in Croatia.
The first indictment against Mladic by the UN war crimes tribunal was issued on 25 July 1995 when he and Bosnian Serb political leader Radovan Karadzic were charged with war crimes in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Later that year another indictment was issued against them for genocide in Srebrenica where 8,000 Bosnian Muslims were killed when forces under Mladic's command entered that eastern Bosnian enclave in July 1995. Upon the arrest of Karadzic in 2008, those two indictments were merged into one document while the cases of Karadzic and Mladic were separated so that the former could go on trial while the latter was still on the run.
So far, the prosecutors have questioned 70 witnesses and presented one third of the evidence at the Karadzic trial.
According to the latest indictment, Mladic is charged with 11 counts for genocide, persecutions, extermination, murder, deportation, inhumane acts, terror, unlawful attacks, taking of hostages.
Some of the gravest crimes in his indictment are the 43-month-long siege of Sarajevo, the Srebrenica massacre and taking UN staff hostage.
Asked by reporters whether it is possible for the tribunal to put Mladic and Karadzic together on trial, Brammertz said that it was not probable as the Karadzic trial started three and a half years ago and the joining of the cases was only theoretically possible.
Mladic and Karadzic are held responsible for being at the helm of a joint criminal enterprise the aim of which was to permanently remove Bosnian Muslims and Croats from areas claimed by Bosnian Serbs in the 1992-1995 war.
ICTY Registrar John Hocking said that Mladic was very co-operative in the process of his transfer to the Hague-based tribunal after his arrival in the Netherlands.
Hocking refused to comment on Mladic's health condition, saying only that communication between him and Mladic while he was being transferred from the Rotterdam airport to the ICTY detention centre was smooth.