Bosnia-Herzegovina: NATO troops failed to capture war crimes fugitive Radovan Karadzic in a night-time raid on his old stronghold yesterday, but seriously wounded a priest and his son, triggering angry protests by Bosnian Serbs.
Around 3,000 people shouting anti-Western slogans gathered outside the Orthodox church in Pale where the two were wounded when troops blew open a door in the middle of the night.
Father Jeremija Starovlah and his son were in critical condition after undergoing surgery, a hospital spokeswoman said.
Big blood stains could be seen on the walls and floor of their damaged home.
"Killers," shouted one woman among the crowd of Serbs, many of whom regard their wartime leader as a hero and their Orthodox churches as inviolate. One protester wore a Karadzic mask and others held banners expressing anger at NATO.
"The international community showed that nothing is sacred and untouchable for them," said parliament speaker Dragan Kalinic, a wartime Karadzic ally. The crowd later dispersed.
Karadzic is charged with genocide in the slaughter of up to 8,000 unarmed Muslim men and boys in the Srebrenica massacre of 1995 and the 1992-95 siege of Sarajevo in which 12,000 were killed by the Bosnian Serbs' vastly superior armed forces.
There was a predictably tough response to the Serb protest by Bosnia's international peace overseer, Lord Ashdown.
"Incidents like this would not happen if Bosnia were fulfilling its responsibilities," he told a news conference.
Bosnian Serb authorities could have averted such an event, had they done more to try and capture Karadzic, he added.
For the past six years, Karadzic is believed to have kept on the move between various remote hideouts in mountainous east Bosnia and neighbouring Montenegro. Western officials have often suspected Orthodox priests of sheltering him in monasteries.
In recent months, NATO has intensified its hunt for him, mounting a three-day search in and around Pale in January that resulted in the subsequent arrest of three suspected members of Karadzic's alleged "support network". They were later freed.
Father Starovlah was quoted last week as saying it was the duty of every priest to help Karadzic, because he prevented genocide of the Serbs by Bosnian Muslims.
Capt Dave Sullivan, an SFOR spokesman, said the force had conducted a "focused operation" to detain Karadzic. - (Reuters)