Serbian war crimes prosecutor Vladimir Vukcevic has two bottles of Australian wine in a glass case in his office - one has a photo of Ratko Mladic stuck on it and the other Radovan Karadzic.

Former international prosecutor Carla del Ponte gave them to him to celebrate when both of the notorious Bosnian Serb leaders are detained, Vukcevic said.

But even with Karadzic in detention and his trial due to start today, the bottle of 2005 cabernet sauvignon is still not open. “I am waiting for her” to drink it together, Vukcevic said. And Vukcevic says he will not fully celebrate until Mladic, the Bosnian Serb military chief during the 1992-95 war that left 100,000 dead, has been caught.

The 59-year-old prosecutor, a thin grey-haired man with bright blue eyes, was appointed in 2006 to head the team hunting fugitives for the International Criminal Tribunal (ICTY) for former Yugoslavia. He was already well respected for his action against war criminals in Serbia.

“The arrest of Radovan Karadzic was a historic event like Mladic’s would be,” he said.

“I had hoped to arrest Karadzic some day, but I have to admit I was more focused on Mladic, so this was a surprise, a complete turnabout,” he added of the detention of Karadzic in July last year.

Karadzic, who was Bosnian-Serb president, and Mladic are notorious for their alleged roles overseeing the 44-month siege of Sarajevo that left 10,000 people dead and the July 1995 massacre of about 8,000 Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica.

Vukcevic said he was informed by intelligence services about “a suspicious eccentric individual, a healer, who might be Radovan Karadzic” a month before the arrest.

“It sounded unbelievable. Then it was confirmed. I couldn’t believe it. I told nobody, absolutely nobody,” he said.

Karadzic had been on the run for 13 years and had apparently lived in the Serbian capital for much of that time under the alias of Dragan Dabic, posing as an alternative healer. A thick grey beard hid his face.

The arrest was a surprise even for ICTY officials, Vukcevic said.

Chief prosecutor Serge Brammertz, and his predecessor Del Ponte, have persistently claimed that Mladic is hiding in Serbia but all believed that Karadzic “vanished into a thin air”.

The prosecutor insisted that bringing Mladic to justice remains the top priority of his team.

“We are really in a rush to track him down and complete this job,” he said, while insisting that Mladic’s arrest would be “no more spectacular than Karadzic’s”.

Vukcevic has often predicted that Mladic would be arrested by the end of 2009 as “all services and forces are focused” on the case.

Bringing Mladic to justice is a key condition for Serbia’s further integration into the European Union. But Vukcevic says it is even more important for justice itself.

“More than 100,000 died (in the Balkan wars). Families of those people expect justice,” he added.

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