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Karadzic 'worked in Serb clinic'!

Mr Karadzic lived freely in Belgrade using a false identity.

Captured Bosnian Serb war crimes suspect Radovan Karadzic was practising alternative medicine and living in Serbia's capital, Belgrade.



He was working in a private clinic in a "very convincing disguise", sporting a long white beard, and calling himself Dragan Dabic, a Serb official said.
He was arrested on Monday near Belgrade after more than a decade on the run.

He is indicted by the UN tribunal for war crimes and genocide over the 1995 massacre at Srebrenica.

A judge has ordered Mr Karadzic's transfer to the UN war crimes court in The Hague, Serbia's war crimes prosecutor Vladimir Vukcevic said.

Mr Karadzic's lawyer, Sveta Vujacic, has said he will appeal against the ruling; he has three days to do so.

Rasim Ljajic, the Serbian minister for relations with the international war crimes tribunal in The Hague, said Mr Karadzic had been living very convincingly as a non-Serbian citizen, using false papers.

"The fact that he was involved with alternative medicine, earning his money from practising alternative medicine, shows that he worked. He was working in a private practice and the last place where he had residence was New Belgrade," Mr Ljajic said at a news conference in Belgrade.

"[Mr Karadzic] walked around freely, even appeared in public places. The people who rented him the apartment did not know his true identity," Mr Vukcevic said.

Certain people who had been helping Mr Karadzic had been under surveillance for some time, the officials added.

They said the authorities did not want to reveal any more details of the Monday evening operation so as not to jeopardise efforts to arrest two other war crime suspects on the run, including Mr Karadzic's wartime military leader, Ratko Mladic.

Mr Karadzic had last been seen in public in eastern Bosnia in 1996 and was previously thought to have hidden in Serb controlled parts of Bosnia, Montenegro and Serbia.

Serbian officials give details of Mr Karadzic's capture!

The arrest of Mr Karadzic and other indicted war criminals is one of the main conditions of Serbian progress towards European Union membership.

French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner, whose country holds the EU's rotating presidency, said a major obstacle to Serbian membership had been lifted.

Mr Karadzic denied the charges against him soon after the first indictment and refused to recognise the legitimacy of the UN tribunal.

The UN says Mr Karadzic's forces killed up to 8,000 Bosniak men and boys from Srebrenica in July 1995 as part of a campaign to "terrorise and demoralise the Bosnian Muslim and Bosnian Croat population".

He was also charged over the shelling of Sarajevo, and the use of 284 UN peacekeepers as human shields in May and June 1995.

After the Dayton accord that ended the Bosnian war in late 1995, the former nationalist president went into hiding.

International pressure to catch Mr Karadzic mounted in spring 2005 when several of his former generals surrendered and a video of Bosnian Serb soldiers shooting captives from Srebrenica shocked television viewers in former Yugoslavia.

He had been a close ally of former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, who was himself extradited to The Hague tribunal in 2001, but died in 2006, shortly before a verdict was due to be delivered in his case.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/7519039.stm