Serbia offers tax-free reward for Mladic capture

BELGRADE (Reuters) - A tax-free million euro reward is on offer to anyone helping Serbia with information leading to the arrest of its most wanted war crimes fugitive, Ratko Mladic, an official said on Monday.

Serbia had already in the past offered a million euro reward, but has clarified that the bonus will be exempt from 20 percent income tax, said Bruno Vekaric, a spokesman for Serbia's Special War Crimes Prosecutor's Office.

"It is clear that the state will pick up tax liability for people who contribute to their arrests," he said of war crimes suspects Mladic and Goran Hadzic.

In recent days Serbia has put up new wanted posters for Mladic, the former commander of Bosnian Serb troops during the 1992-1995 war and Hadzic, who led Croatian Serbs during the 1991-1995 conflict there. The posters show the reward figure of a million euros for information leading to the arrest Mladic and 250,000 euros for Hadzic.

Mladic is sought by the U.N. war crimes court for former Yugoslavia for the 1995 massacre of about 8,000 Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica and for the 43-month siege of Sarajevo. Hadzic is accused of war crimes committed in Croatia.

Serbia must arrest and extradite the two fugitives if it wants to join the European Union.

Last year Serbian authorities arrested Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb wartime political leader and extradited him to the U.N. war crimes tribunal in The Hague.

The United States offered a $5 million reward each for Karadzic and Mladic.

Vekaric would not say whether anyone collected reward money for Karadzic. Last August, Serbian media reported, the money was forwarded to a Virgin Islands-based account.

(Reporting by Aleksandar Vasovic; editing by Adam Tanner)