Former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, accused architect of war crimes including Europe's worst massacre since World War II, was arrested after more than a decade on the run, the country's president and the U.N. tribunal for the former Yugoslavia said.
Charged with organizing the deadly siege of Sarajevo and the 1995 massacre of up to 8,000 Muslims in Srebrenica, Karadzic topped the tribunal's most-wanted list for more than a decade.
The tribunal described him as the suspected mastermind of "scenes from hell, written on the darkest pages of human history." Prosecutors suspected he eluded the manhunt with the help of Bosnian Serb nationalists and a string of elaborate disguises.
"This is a very important day for the victims who have waited for this arrest for over a decade," the tribunal's head prosecutor, Serge Brammertz, said. "It clearly demonstrates that nobody is beyond the reach of the law and that sooner or later all fugitives will be brought to justice."
Serbian President Boris Tadic's office said Karadzic, 63, was arrested Monday evening "in an action by the Serbian security services" and taken before the investigative judge of Serbia's war crimes court, indicating imminent extradition to the U.N. war crimes court in The Hague, Netherlands.
A Serbian police source, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not allowed to speak to the media, said Karadzic was arrested in a Belgrade suburb after a tip from a foreign intelligence service and weeks of surveillance of his safe house.
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