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Mr Radovan Karadzic
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NATO troops swooped into a remote Bosnian village today, blasting their way into buildings and seizing a weapons cache in what proved a fruitless search for accused war criminal Mr Radovan Karadzic.
NATO did not say whether the former Bosnian Serb leader actually slipped through the net during the operation or whether the intelligence received on his whereabouts was wrong.
But it said the military sweep showed the alliance's determination to capture Mr Karadzic and other suspects wanted by the UN war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. An SFOR statement said the operation showed showed they were willing to use force in the pursuit of Mr Karadzic.
After the operation, the entrances to private houses, apartments, cellars, a grocery shop, an agricultural cooperative building and an Orthodox Serb church all bore signs of forced entry or had been demolished.
SFOR said it had found three weapons caches at the compound containing significant quantities of anti-tank rockets, grenades, mortar rounds, automatic machineguns, antipersonnel mines and large-calibre ammunition.
Western officials have said in recent months they are stepping up efforts to ensure wartime political leader Mr Karadzic and his military chief Mr Ratko Mladic are brought to justice.
The two men have been indicted on genocide charges both for the 1995 mass killing of up to 8,000 Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica and for the three-and-a-half-year siege of Sarajevo, which killed around 12,000 people.
With their erstwhile patron, former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, now on trial at The Hague tribunal, Mr Karadzic and Gen Mladic are top of the tribunal's wanted list.
Bosnian Serb Prime Minister Mr Mladen Ivanic protested against the operation, complaining his authorities had not been informed or consulted in advance.
"It is impermissible that such an operation take place without the knowledge of any institution of the Serb Republic," Mr Ivanic told the Bosnian Serb parliament in Banja Luka.