THE rumour mill in Belgrade went into overdrive yesterday amid reports that Europe’s most wanted man had been captured.

Ratko Mladic, the fugitive Bosnian Serb general sought by the international war crimes tribunal in The Hague, was variously reported to have been captured, surrounded, or on the point of a negotiated surrender in return for cash for his family.

But, as night fell, the initial excited reports pouring out of Serbian television stations gave way to a flurry of denials.

“The news about Ratko Mladic is not correct,” Srdjan Djuric, the government spokesman in Belgrade, said. “This is a manipulation that undermines the Serbian Government’s efforts to complete co-operation with the war crimes tribunal in The Hague.”

British officials confirmed that General Mladic was still at large, but said that there was growing international pressure on Belgrade to secure his arrest.

The 62-year-old general, who is accused of genocide and other war crimes, commanded the Bosnian Serb Army during successive civil wars in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. He is charged with perpetrating the worst war crimes in Europe since the Second World War.

His indictment alleges that he ordered the murder of more than 7,000 men and boys in the Muslim safe haven of Srebrenica in 1995 and was responsible for the 43-month siege of Sarajevo, where 12,000 people were killed.

Speculation about an imminent arrest has been prompted in part by pressure from the European Union, which has warned Serbia and Montenegro that it will halt membership negotiations by next Tuesday if General Mladic is not in custody.

“We have no information that something particular has happened today,” said Florence Hartmann, a spokeswoman for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. “We have said for the last ten days that the arrest could take place very quickly.”

One senior official close to the war crimes investigation in Sarajevo said that he believed that General Mladic was in the safekeeping of elements of the Serb security forces.

There have been rumours that he is negotiating a surrender, and would be prepared to turn himself in if his family received a pay-off and colleagues were given immunity from prosecution.

The official thought that the deal was being brokered “by a group of politicians, clerics and military officers — all Serb, with no outside interference”. There are concerns in Belgrade that yesterday’s premature report of his surrender was put out by elements in Serbia who want to wreck the deal.

Zoran Stankovic, the Serbia and Montenegro Defence Minister, recently told The Times that he had had talks with General Mladic’s family and that “the operation to catch Mladic is under way”.

Dr Stankovic, who has close connections with the Mladic family, said that he held a meeting with the general’s wife and son just before New Year’s Eve. “When something is still in progress, you don’t disclose any information. It would only interfere with the ongoing investigation,” he told The Times.

But his comments will raise speculation that serious efforts are under way by Belgrade to arrest him or to facilitate his surrender. Dr Stankovic denied that his ministry was involved in any financial negotiations for a surrender, adding: “Money means nothing to him. As for the military, he’s not hiding in any of our facilities. We don’t have any information on his whereabouts”.

Reports of the imminent arrest of General Mladic, or his former political master, Radovan Karadzic, proliferate every time Serbia faces a Western deadline. General Mladic lived openly in Belgrade until the fall of Slobodan Milosevic, the former Yugoslav President, in 2000.

“Unfortunately, nothing happened,” a spokeswoman for Carla Del Ponte, the chief prosecutor in The Hague, said last night. “Mladic was not arrested, although he is within the reach of the authorities in Belgrade.”

FROM SOLDIER TO CRIMINAL

Subsequent indictments relate to the slaughter of at least 7,000 Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica from July 13 to July 19 1995