NATO troops yesterday scaled down a major weekend hunt for top Bosnian Serb war crimes suspect Radovan Karadzic, triggered by a tip that injury may have forced him to seek help in his old headquarters town.
If Mr Karadzic had indeed been there, he appeared to have once again slipped the net. By nightfall, only an ex-paramilitary policeman said to be "a supporter" had been detained, outside a nearby ski-resort hotel.
"They have been looking for my husband in the walls, in every inch of the house and, how absurd, in the septic tank," said the former leader's wife Ljiljana. "They seem to believe Radovan would hide like Saddam Hussein."
The "short-notice" manhunt began in a snowstorm on Saturday, as 200 troops and police fanned out in the town of Pale to search hospital and church buildings from top to bottom, looking under beds, in cupboards and even the church bell-tower.
Mr Karadzic's former fiefdom sits in the mountains above the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo, whose bloody 1992-95 siege earned him his first UN indictment for genocide.
The NATO-led Stabilisation Force (SFOR) said it was acting on reliable information that Mr Karadzic had contacted his family and supporters, and might be injured. The search, which included local Bosnian Serb police, was the "single biggest joint operation we have conducted in 18 months," SFOR Capt Mathew Brock said. "Mr Karadzic has not been located," he said. But ammunition and documents found in his wife's house could be "very useful in determining his whereabouts," Capt Brock added.
He said SFOR would maintain a presence in Pale overnight and probably end the operation by noon today.
Karadzic and his military chief Ratko Mladic are both also indicted for genocide in the 1995 massacre of up to 8,000 Muslims in Srebrenica.
Informants are offered a $5 million reward for the capture of Mr Karadzic, one of the world's most elusive fugitives.
The prospect of injury or illness forcing him to surrender would be tantalising for NATO, which has sought him for eight years.
His arrest would also be a dramatic milestone for Bosnia, which is still poisoned by bitterness from the ethnic war that took over 200,000 lives between 1992 and 1995.
But some Serbs regard Mr Karadzic and Gen Mladic as heroes and would hate to see either man in handcuffs. - (Reuters)