Serbia captures fugitive wartime leader Karadzic

Karadzic, the wartime Bosnian Serb leader who had managed to remain at large for 13 years despite an international manhunt, was arrested by Serbian security forces on Monday night.

Despite his status as one of the most wanted men on the planet, Karadzic, 63, had been working in a medical clinic with only a false name and a beard to conceal his identity.

“He was working and performing alternative medicine, making money that way,” said Rasim Ljajic, the Serbian minister in charge of cooperation with the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague.

“He was very convincing in hiding his identity,” said Ljajic, who held up a photograph of Karadzic with almost hippy-like long white hair and beard.

Of all the ICTY fugitives, Karadzic was always the subject of the most fevered speculation about his whereabouts.

He had last been seen in public in the eastern Bosnian town of Han Pijesak in July 1996, and was previously thought to have hidden away in Serb-controlled parts of Bosnia, Montenegro and Serbia, or even Russia.

Following his capture, he was questioned by a magistrate who concluded “all conditions have been met for his transfer” to The Hague for trial, said Serbia’s war crimes prosecutor.

The arrest of Karadzic — wanted for orchestrating two of Europe’s worst atrocities since World War II, the siege of Sarajevo and the Srebrenica massacre — means there are only two more fugitives of the U.N. court at large.

They are his former military commander Ratko Mladic, 65, and Goran Hadzic, 49, a former Serb politician wanted for “ethnic cleansing” in Croatia.

The handover of the war crimes fugitives is a major pre-condition for Serbian accession to the European Union.

Karadzic’s arrest took place two weeks after the formation of a new pro-EU membership government dominated by President Boris Tadic’s pro-Western Democratic Party.

It also came only four days after Sasa Vukadinovic, close to the Democrats, became the head of Serbia’s police intelligence agency, replacing an official aligned with former hardline nationalist prime minister Vojislav Kostunica.

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