Serbia charges Milosevic's supporters

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BELGRADE, Serbia, Nov. 22 (UPI) -- A Belgrade court Wednesday filed charges against 36 people for trying to prevent the arrest of former Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic in 2001.

Aleksandra Nesovic, a spokeswoman for the Belgrade Municipal Court, said the group will go on trial Dec. 22 charged with forming a human shield outside a Belgrade villa on April 1, 2001, in an effort to prevent the arrest of the former Yugoslav and Serbian president, the Serbian news agency Tanjug reported.

Milosevic was ousted from power when hundreds of thousands of people from Belgrade and across Serbia took to the streets of the capital in October 2000, to protest reported vote-rigging in presidential elections.

After a Serbian pro-Western reformist government arrested him in April 2001, Milosevic was transferred to the U.N. tribunal in The Hague to stand trial on genocide and war crimes against humanity charges in the former Yugoslavia from 1991-95.

Milosevic died of a heart attack in March in his cell as the trial against him was under way.