Serb war leader's son seized

Witnesses in Pale, Karadzic's wartime stronghold near Sarajevo where his wife, son and daughter live, said NATO soldiers set up a meeting with Aleksandar "Sasa" Karadzic, then handcuffed him and took him away by helicopter.

"They took Sasa from his flat. He was handcuffed and wore a flak-jacket. They put him in a black jeep and then put a hood over his head," Vesna Gutalj, a grocer, said.

Aleksandar's sister, Sonja Karadzic Jovicevic, said NATO had set up a meeting with Sasa to return documents seized in May during a raid on the apartment of his father-in-law, where he lives with his wife and two children.

NATO soldiers asked other family members to leave the room and when his father-in-law entered a few minutes later it was empty, she said.

Witnesses said they saw the soldiers put Sasa on to a helicopter at a nearby playground.

The arrest comes a few days before the 10th anniversary on 11 July of the Srebrenica massacre of 8,000 Muslim men and boys, for which Karadzic and his wartime military chief Ratko Mladic are charged with genocide by the UN court.

"Aleksandar Karadzic is suspected of rendering support to an ... indicted war criminal, and may have information vital to the goal of locating indicted war criminals or identifying their supporters," NATO said in a statement.

Sonja Karadzic called it a "kidnapping", part of constant pressure on the family, and said it was probably related to the 10th anniversary of the "Srebrenica events". She added: "But they know better than us that we have not had contact with Radovan Karadzic for years, since they follow [us] and tap our phones all the time. The family is the weakest link in his support network."

NATO raided the homes of Karadzic's family in May searching for information. A NATO official said last week the alliance did not know where Karadzic was.

Karadzic and Mladic are also charged with the wartime siege of Sarajevo in which 10,000 people were killed. About 200,000 people died in the 1992-95 Bosnian war, mostly Bosnian Muslims.

Karadzic went underground in 1997. Mladic lived discreetly in Belgrade until 2002 then vanished. The West says they are both protected by hardline Serb nationalists in Serbia, Bosnia and Montenegro.

NATO intelligence indicated the 60-year-old former psychiatrist was in the remote mountain village of Celebici in 2002 but a two-day search operation failed to find him.

"But even if he is around they can never catch him," Celebici's only grocer, Milivoje Brkovic, said wryly, looking out through his shop window where a faded Karadzic poster was hanging. "They would have done that by now if they could."

"The ongoing failure of NATO forces to apprehend Radovan Karadzic, and its failure to arrest Ratko Mladic when he was in Bosnia, compounds the international community's dereliction of duty to protect the inhabitants of Srebrenica," the New York-based watchdog, Human Rights Watch, said in a report last month.

Karadzic's whereabouts have been a mystery for the past eight years.

The UN court's chief prosecutor Carla del Ponte says he is hiding in eastern Bosnia and Montenegro and has chided NATO for not doing enough to catch him.

An official at the Sarajevo headquarters of NATO, which handed over its peacekeeping mantle to the European Union in December to concentrate on the war crimes hunt, admitted the alliance was in the dark about Karadzic's location.

"We don't know where he is exactly, he could be in Serbia or Bosnia or travelling in between," the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said.

NATO's last arrest operation based on a credible sighting was in September 2003, when troops searched an Orthodox monastery in the eastern Bosnian town of Cajnice, some 12 miles from Celebici.

Both locations are in a vast area neighbouring Serbia and Karadzic's native Montenegro, where Karadzic can count on porous borders, thick forests and support from local residents.

The military alliance's last confirmed sighting of Karadzic was in mid-2001 at a Belgrade restaurant. A Montenegrin journalist and Karadzic watcher, Seki Radoncic, says Serbia is still his most likely hideout.

Karadzic's most vocal supporters are based in Belgrade, where they have published and promoted his wartime letters, poetry, children's stories and memoirs. But even they say they have no idea of his whereabouts.