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A most-wanted fugitive lived for years in plain sight

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

July 23, 2008

BELGRADE, Serbia - For more than a decade, the world's most-wanted war crimes fugitive displayed a talent for eluding international justice. His secret? Hide in plain sight.

In a ruse worthy of any thriller, Radovan Karadzic transformed himself from a leader instantly recognizable by his famous shock of salt-and-pepper hair into a man resembling a New Age mystic, with a flowing white beard and black robe.

Believed to be protected by a coterie of ultra-nationalists, the former Bosnian Serb strongman - a doctor and psychiatrist who received training in the United States - worked at an alternative medicine clinic in Belgrade.

Karadzic's disguise was so effective that prosecutors say he walked freely around town without being noticed and even his landlords didn't know his true identity.

A photo displayed by prosecutors at a news conference yesterday showed a gaunt elderly man unrecognizable from the robust warlord who strutted brashly before his troops during the 1992-1995 Bosnian war.

That life on the run ended abruptly with Karadzic's capture Monday - an arrest made possible by the election of a new pro-Western government that tightened the dragnet around the war crimes suspect.

Many observers have long suspected that recently fallen Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica, a nationalist with close ties to Karadzic during the Bosnian war, had shielded him from arrest.

Karadzic's capture has broad political implications - for the future of the UN war crimes tribunal, eventual closure of the cycle of Balkan blood feuds and for Serbia's fitful journey out of international isolation.

The wartime Bosnian Serb leader stands accused of genocide for masterminding the deadly siege of Sarajevo and the massacre of 8,000 Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica, Europe's worst carnage since the end of World War II.

The fugitive had been masquerading as an expert in "human quantum energy" using the fake name "D.D. David" printed on his business card. The initials apparently stood for Dragan Dabic, an alias authorities said he used.

He even had his own Web site and gave lectures before hundreds of people on alternative medicine.

The site displays pictures of metallic bullet-shaped amulets and Orthodox crosses with wires running out of them.

TV footage provided by a local station to Associated Press Television News shows Karadzic sitting on a panel at a medical conference, glancing nervously at the cameraman next to him - another glimpse into his knife's-edge life of hiding in plain view.

Using his alias, Karadzic was a regular contributor to the Serbian alternative medicine magazine "Healthy Life;" its editor Goran Kojic said he was stunned when he saw the photo of Karadzic on TV and realized the bizarre truth.

"It never even occurred to me that this man with a long white beard and hair was Karadzic," said Kojic. "He was eloquent and a bit strange, like a true bohemian." Karadzic's whereabouts had been a mystery since he went on the run in 1998, with his hide-outs reportedly including monasteries and mountain caves in remote eastern Bosnia. The United States set a $5 million bounty for his arrest.

Karadzic's lawyer Sveta Vujcic claimed his client was arrested Friday, not on Monday as authorities say.

He said Karadzic was hooded during the capture and kept for three days in solitary confinement.

A judge ordered Karadzic's transfer to the UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague, Netherlands, to face genocide charges, war crimes prosecutor Vladimir Vukcevic said. Karadzic has three days to appeal the ruling.