BELGRADE, July 22: Bosnian Serb wartime president Radovan Karadzic, wanted for genocide and crimes against humanity during the Bosnian war, was arrested near Belgrade after 11 years on the run, in disguise and working as a doctor, officials said on Tuesday.

Karadzic’s arrest was one of the main conditions of Serbian progress towards European Union membership and may be enough to secure Serbia closer ties with the EU and possibly the status of membership candidate this year.

Serbian officials said Karadzic was arrested on Monday evening while moving from one Belgrade suburb to another. They showed reporters a photograph of an unrecognisable Karadzic, thin, with a long, white beard, flowing hair and thick glasses.

He was working for a private clinic, posing as a specialist in alternative medicine, said Rasim Ljajic, Serbia’s point man for cooperation with The Hague war crimes tribunal.

“He was using false documents under the name of Dragan Dabic,” he said.

His last known address was in New Belgrade, a sprawling suburb of massive tower blocks that can house dozens of flats.

“He happily, freely walked around the city,” Serbia’s war crimes prosecutor Vladimir Vukcevic told journalists. “Even the people he rented a flat from were unaware of his identity.”

When the news broke on Monday, people poured in celebration onto the streets of Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital which Karadzic’s troops shelled mercilessly in a 43-month siege during the 1992-95 Bosnian war.

“I called and woke up my whole family,” said Sarajevo resident Fadil Bico as cars honked horns and Bosnian state radio played excerpts of Karadzic’s wartime hate speeches.

EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana said his arrest showed Belgrade was cooperating fully with the UN war crimes tribunal. An EU foreign ministers’ meeting was to discuss closer ties with the new pro-western government.

Karadzic was indicted in 1995 along with his army commander, General Ratko Mladic, for genocide at Srebrenica, where some 8,000 unarmed Bosnian Muslim males were rounded up and murdered and bulldozed into mass graves.

He is also charged with authorising the shooting of civilians during the Sarajevo siege in which an estimated 11,000 people were killed.

Richard Holbrooke, former US Balkan trouble shooter during the wars of the 1990s’ described Karadzic as the Osama bin Laden of Europe, “a real, true architect of mass murder”.

Karadzic went underground more than a year after Holbrooke negotiated the 1995 Dayton accords that ended the war in Bosnia and following the deployment of a huge force of Nato peacekeepers in early 1996.

His arrest leaves two war crimes suspects still wanted by the Hague tribunal.

“The arrest of Radovan Karadzic is confirmation that every criminal will eventually face justice,” said Munira Subasic, head of a Srebrenica widow’s association.

“I hope that people who had to keep quiet because of Karadzic will start revealing the locations of mass graves and let us find the truth about our beloved ones,” she said.—Reuters