Secret life of Serb butcher

The man hunted for 12 years over the deaths of 20,000 victims of Europe's worst conflict since the Second World War lived in disguise in Belgrade where he practised alternative medicine, it was revealed today.

A flowing white beard and spectacles hid the dark secret of 63-year-old Radovan Karadzic from his patients at a private clinic.

The former leader of the breakaway Serb republic in Bosnia, whose arrest on a bus in the city on Friday was announced yesterday, is indicted by the UN on charges of war crimes and genocide.

The charges include the 1995 massacre of 8,000 unarmed Muslim men at Srebrenica and the bloody three-year siege of Sarajevo where he is accused of authorising the shooting of civilians.

A United Nations indictment says Karadzic and general Ratko Mladic are responsible for the unlawful confinement, murder, rape and inhumane treatment of the non- Serb civilian population in Bosnia-Hercegovina during the 1992-95 war.

Detainees were terrorised by random brutality and sexual violence, the UN says. The terror campaign aimed at driving non-Serbs from the newlydeclared republic saw the term "ethnic cleansing" enter common usage. Mladic is still on the run.

It is thought Karadzic, who went into hiding in 1996 after the war ended, sometimes disguised himself as a priest and was sheltered by Serb nationalist sympathisers.

But when a pro-European government took power in Belgrade last month, pressure intensified to track him down. Karadzic's arrest was one of the main conditions of Serbian progress towards European Union membership, which most of its people want.

His last known address was a flat in New Belgrade, a sprawling suburb of massive concrete tower blocks, where he was known as Dragan Dabic. He did not resist arrest. His lawyer, Svetozar Vujacic, told reporters that Karadzic was arrested while taking a bus between two suburbs of Belgrade.

Investigators conducted a formal identification process, including DNA testing, before interviewing him overnight.

In Srebrenica, a mother who lost two sons in the massacre wept as she watched the news on television. Munira Subasic said: "After 13 years, we finally reached the moment of truth. For the sake of justice, general Mladic should be arrested too." Thousands of Bosnians celebrated the news of the arrest in the streets of Sarajevo today.

Former US diplomat Richard Holbrooke, who brokered peace in Bosnia in 1995, said: "A major, major thug has been removed from the public scene. One of the worst men in the world, the Osama Bin Laden of Europe, has finally been captured. He was at large because the Yugoslav army was protecting him. But this guy, in my view, was worse than [former Serbian leader Slobodan] Milosevic ... he was the intellectual leader."

Lawyers for Karadzic, a psychologist and part-time poet, insisted his detention was "against the law". Heavilyarmed special forces of the Serbian Gendarmerie were deployed around the war-crimes court in Belgrade for Karadzic's appearance before judges - apparently fearing a backlash from nationalists who consider him their war hero. "He did not surrender, that is not his style," his brother Luka Karadzic said outside the court.

Dozens of Karadzic supporters gathered near the building chanting "Karadzic Hero". Several were arrested after attacking reporters.