SARAJEVO, Feb 28: NATO troops failed on Thursday to arrest top war crimes fugitive Radovan Karadzic during a raid on a tiny village in southeastern Bosnia where the Bosnian Serb war-time leader was thought to be hiding.
Acting on a tip, soldiers from the NATO-led Stabilization Force (SFOR) arrived aboard four helicopters in Celebici, some 70 kilometres southeast of Sarajevo, residents and SFOR officials said.
SFOR troops “conducted an operation to detain Radovan Karadzic near the town of Celebici,” an SFOR statement said.
“Karadzic was not found at this location”, it added.
It was the first time that NATO has revealed a major operation to nab the former Bosnian Serb president who tops the list of the UN war crimes tribunal’s most wanted fugitives.
Karadzic, 56, has been indicted for war crimes and genocide committed during Bosnia’s 1992-95 war, including the siege of Sarajevo and the 1995 massacre of 6,500 Muslims in Srebrenica.
NATO troops seized three weapons caches in several of the buildings in Celebici, including “significant quantities of anti-tank rockets, grenades, mortar rounds, automatic machine guns, and anti-personnel mines”, SFOR said.
Residents of Celebici said that soldiers forced their way into a school, church, grocery store and houses during the raid that lasted about one hour.
“They came in wearing camouflage uniforms and black masks and searched everything” a villager told an AFP photographer who was in the town.
The troops said nothing to the villagers about their hunt for Karadzic, instead handing them a piece of paper with the message “Don’t be afraid. This is a routine check” in English, German and Serbian.
An elementary school teacher said a soldier burst into her classroom and ordered the children to leave.
“All the pupils and the teachers were gathered in a single room and we were not allowed to leave,” said the teacher who asked not to be named.
An AFP photographer saw the damaged door of the grocery store, which appeared to have been blown open with explosives. He also noticed damage on the doors of several homes which residents said had been pried open by soldiers using a crowbar.
Celebici’s villagers, who are Serbs, refuse to say whether Karadzic had ever been hiding there.
In its statement, SFOR said that it remained committed to bring all indictees to justice and urged the government of Republika Srpska, the Serb-run half of Bosnia, to turn in war crimes suspects.
As troops finished pulling back from the area, Karadzic’s brother Luka told Belgrade radio that he was “fine” and former advisor Jovan Zametica was quoted as saying that NATO forces were “definitely” clueless about his whereabouts.
In Banja Luka, Bosnian Serb Prime Minister Mladen Ivanic slammed NATO for failing to advise his government of the operation, saying such a practice was “unacceptable.”
But in Sarajevo, Beriz Belkic, the Muslim member of Bosnia’s tripartite presidency, told AFP: “We were very hopeful of Karadzic’s arrest after receiving news about the SFOR operation.”
Belkic said the operation was a sign that SFOR was “finally ready to arrest the most wanted suspects.”
SFOR troops have captured 23 war crimes suspects in Bosnia since 1997 while more than 20 others, mostly Bosnian Serbs, remain at large including Karadzic and his war-time military chief, Ratko Mladic.
There have been mounting calls for Karadzic and Mladic to be turned over to the tribunal in The Hague since the start earlier this month of the trial of former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic.
The Bosnian Serb government earlier in February gave war crimes suspects a 30-day deadline to surrender or lose their chance of being provisionally released on bail.—AFP