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Karadzic Arrest / Broadband – Download (WM)
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In a statement, monitored by BosNewsLife, the office of Serbian President Boris Tadic said former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic was arrested late Monday in a raid by
Serbian security forces. "Radovan Karadzic was located and arrested tonight" added the presidential statement.
It came thirteen years after he went into hiding to avoid arrest by the Netherlands-based United Nations War Crimes Tribunal for his alleged involvement in masterminding of up to 8,000 Muslim men and boys by Serb forces in the Bosnian town of Srebrenica in 1995.
Prosecutors of The Hague-based court charged Karadzic with genocide and crimes against humanity during the Bosnian war.
CHRISTIAN AID GROUPS
Several aid groups, including Christian organizations and the son of American evangelist Billy Graham, Franklin, have since travelled to the region to give spiritual and material support to survivors, BosNewsLife established. Officials said Karadzic was transferred to an investigative judge of Serbia’s War Crimes Court in Belgrade.
In the United States, the White House welcomed the arrest and said it is atribute to the victims of the war’s attrocities. Yet, Karadzic’s wartime military commander Ratko Mladic, who is also among the most wanted men by the war crimes court, remained at large Monday, July 21.
The executive director of the Belgrade-based Balkan Trust for Democracy, Ivan Vejvoda, said however that Karadzic’s arrest was the right move for the Serbian government. The arrest "shows the new government in Belgrade has demonstrated in practice that it has the political will to move forward and to make the arrest of the three remaining inditees a priority of its government," he said.
UN PROSECUTOR
The UN Chief Prosecutor Serge Brammertz also welcomed the arrest of Karadzic, saying it is an "important day for international justice because it clearly demonstrates that nobody is beyond the reach of the law."
Serbia had been under pressure from the European Union, Washington and the United Nations to turn Karadzic and other war time suspects over to The Hague tribunal.
At the same time, UN prosecutors often expressed their frustration that thousands of NATO-led peacekeepers in the region were apparently unable to capture him. (Parts of this BosNewsLife News story also airs on the Voice Of America (VOA) network. www.voanews.com).
