(BELGRADE) - UN prosecutor Serge Brammertz visits Serbia on Wednesday to assess its war crimes cooperation in his first trip to Belgrade since the arrest of Bosnian Serb genocide suspect Radovan Karadzic.

Serbia hopes Brammertz will provide a positive appraisal of its cooperation with the International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia (ICTY), a key condition for its integration into the European Union.

Starting the two-day visit, Brammertz is to meet with the Serbian "Action Team" established to track down the last two fugitives, Karadzic's wartime army chief Ratko Mladic and former Croatian Serb leader Goran Hadzic.

He will also hold talks with his Serbian counterpart, Vladimir Vukcevic, who told AFP on the eve of the visit that the hunt for Mladic had been stepped up, involving 10,000 officials, under Belgrade's new West-leaning government.

The bid to capture Mladic "has always been intense, but my feeling is that it's been intensified even more now as this new government insists" on ending the issue, Vukcevic said in an interview.

"We have stronger political support, there is a visible consensus of all state institutions to complete this thing," said the Serbian war crimes prosecutor.

The Serbian government led by President Boris Tadic's Democratic Party took over in July from one headed by former nationalist prime minister Vojislav Kostunica, who favoured voluntary surrenders of war crimes fugitives.

Within two weeks, it ordered the arrest of Bosnian Serb war time president Radovan Karadzic and sent him to the UN war crimes court in The Hague.

Karadzic was detained while riding a Belgrade bus under the stolen identity of "Dragan Dabic," an alternative medicine guru disguised with long hair and a bushy beard.

In his interview, Vukcevic said it was unlikely that Mladic had taken a new identity like Karadzic, his wartime political leader.

"I cannot claim whether (Mladic) is in Serbia or not, but my estimate, based on all collected information so far, is that he is hiding in Serbia," Vukcevic told AFP.

Officials in Serbia previously stated that the military protected Mladic until 2002 and he hid in various Belgrade apartments and received a pension up to 2005.

Serbia's new pro-EU government, which came to power on July 7, has been bolstered by parliament's ratification of a rapprochement accord with the European Union on Tuesday, after weeks of opposition obstruction.

However, the application of the so-called Stabilisation and Association Accord was frozen under pressure from the Netherlands and Belgium, who insisted on full Serb co-operation with the ICTY for further rapprochement.

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