NATO in Bosnia raids house of Karadzic's wife
(Agencies)
Updated: 2005-05-25 18:49

NATO soldiers on Wednesday raided the house of the wife of top Bosnian Serb war crimes suspect Radovan Karadzic, looking for information about the fugitive and his support network, an alliance spokesman said.

"We are conducting a search of the house of Ljiljana Karadzic," Derek Chappel told Reuters. "We are looking for information about the movements and whereabouts of Radovan Karadzic and about his support network.

He declined to say whether genocide suspect Karadzic himself had been the target of the raid in his wartime stronghold, 16 km (10 miles) in the mountains east of Sarajevo.

Reuters Television images showed dozens of U.S. soldiers in combat gear around the house. They escorted a woman and a man from the house to one of dozens of four-wheel-drive vehicles.

NATO handed over peacekeeping duties in Bosnia to the European Union last December, but has kept a headquarters in Bosnia to hunt war crimes suspects and help fight terrorism.

The alliance has raided houses belonging to the Karadzic family and others in Pale on several occasions in recent years but has failed to find Karadzic.

His continued freedom is an embarrassment both for NATO and the EU. The failure to capture Karadzic also prevents Bosnia from establishing formal links with NATO and EU.

Karadzic was Bosnian Serb leader in the 1992-95 conflict which killed up to 200,000 people. He and his military commander and fellow fugitive Ratko Mladic have both been indicted twice for genocide by the U.N. war crimes tribunal in the Hague.

They were charged for the 43-month siege of Sarajevo and the July 1995 massacre of up to 8,000 Muslim men and boys in the eastern U.N. "safe area" of Srebrenica.

Karadzic, believed to be hiding in eastern Bosnia and neighboring Montenegro, and Mladic, who has been reported to be sheltered by the military in Serbia, have ignored calls by the Bosnian Serb and Serbian authorities to surrender voluntarily.

U.N. tribunal's Chief Prosecutor Carle del Ponte cast doubt last week on the latest in a series of reports about Karadzic sightings, which had him having lunch with his wife in a roadside restaurant in eastern Bosnia in early April.

She said her staff have been receiving a tip off a month about Kardzic's whereabouts, but they often prove to be false.