Serbia blundered in the search for its most wanted fugitive war crimes suspect, Ratko Mladic, when it arrested his helpers years ago instead of trailing them, the country's prosecutor for war crimes said in an interview released Tuesday. Acting on orders of the government task force in charge of tracking down Mladic, police arrested several of his helpers in 2006, cutting the trail which may have led to him, prosecutor Vladimir Vukcevic told the daily Vecernje Novosti.

"I think it was a false estimate, a move without logic in intelligence activities which has set back the search for fugitive war criminals," said Vukcevic, who was not a member of the task force at the time.

The arrest of the remaining war crimes suspects wanted by The Hague-based United Nations war crimes tribunal is the key condition for Serbia's closer links with the European Union.

Mladic, 67, was the Bosnian Serb military commander accused of genocide for atrocities such as the three-year siege of Sarajevo and the massacre of 8,000 people at Srebrenica in 1995.

Indicted in 1995, Mladic had been hiding in Serbia with the help of the military even after the fall of president Slobodan Milosevic in 2000.

The other remaining fugitive from the UN tribunal, Goran Hadzic, 51, a leader in the 1991-95 Serb insurgency in Croatia, is accused of crimes against humanity. Hadzic has been on the run since his indictment in 2004.