PALE, Bosnia-Herzegovina: Amid bursts of gunfire and an explosion, NATO troops encircled a church and a rectory yesterday in the stronghold of former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, but again failed to find the world's allegedly most sought after war-crimes suspect.

"We did not locate the person we were looking for," said Captain Dave Sullivan of Canada, a spokesman for Bosnia's NATO-led peacekeepers, speaking hours after the start of the pre-dawn raid.

While he did not name the suspect, it appeared clear that the sweep had been a renewed attempt to capture Karadzic, indicted by the United Nations tribunal in The Hague, the Netherlands, on suspicion of war-crimes. Pale was the headquarters of Karadzic during the Bosnian war Europe's worst bloodshed since World War II. His wife and daughter continue to live there.

The targeted building was the home of three Serb Orthodox priests and their families.

About 100 residents, some angry and others confused, gathered around the area, cordoned off by peacekeepers with white tape in the centre of Pale. Bursts of machine-gun fire were heard along with an explosion. A helicopter landed and took off with two people on stretchers on board.

A priest, Jeremija Starovlah, 52, and a younger man believed to be his son, Aleksandar, were taken to the hospital in the northern town of Tuzla. Both men suffered multiple fractures and head wounds, Amra Odobasic, a spokeswom.

Indicating that the sweep was over, the statement said NATO had transferred duties to Bosnian Serb police, who continue to "secure the area."

The operation appeared to be the latest in a series of unsuccessful NATO attempts to arrest Karadzic, believed to be on the run inside the Bosnian Serb half of Bosnia.

The indictment against Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, his fugitive wartime general, accuses them of being "criminally responsible for the unlawful confinement, murder, rape, sexual assault, torture, beating, robbery and inhumane treatment of civilians."

Among actions the two are accused of masterminding is the massacre of more than 6,000 Muslims in Srebrenica, which came to be known as Europe's worst slaughter of civilians since World War II.

The indictment also links them to the three-and-a-half-year-long shelling and siege of mostly Muslim Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital, kept surrounded by Bosnian Serb military forces from the start to the end of the war.

The war began in early 1992, after Bosnian Serbs refused to honour the results of a February referendum accepted by the republic's Muslims and Croats that called for its secession from Yugoslavia.

(China Daily 04/03/2004 page8)