War crimes suspect had false ID and practised medicine

RADOVAN KARADZIC was living under a false name, had radically changed his appearance and was working as a practitioner of alternative medicine when he was arrested after 11 years on the run.

Officials showed a photograph that they said was of Karadzic.

It showed a man far thinner than Karadzic was when he went on the run, and his plump, clean-shaven face and bouffant hair had been replaced by a thick white beard and large glasses.

His lawyers have complained that he had actually been arrested last Friday and, they say, held unlawfully until his capture was announced on Monday night.

"He just said that these people showed him a police badge and then he was taken to some place and kept in the room. And that is absolutely against the law, what they did," said lawyer Sveta Vujacic.

Another of Karadzic's lawyers said he had refused to answer questions and had called the case against him "a farce".

Karadzic lived quietly in New Belgrade, a sprawling suburb of massive, anonymous tower blocks that can house dozens of flats. Officials say he used the name Dr Dragan David Dabic, and made a living as a practitioner of alternative medicine.

Last October he showed up at a wellness convention organised by Healthy Life magazine, and introduced himself to the editor as a neuro-psychiatrist who wanted to contribute articles.

That part of his new identity was closest to his old self: Karadzic had studied in Sarajevo and qualified as a psychiatrist specialising in neurosis and depression.

He liked to write, sometimes morbid and surreal poetry, sometimes children's poems.

"He was a kind man, with good manners, quiet and witty," Goran Kojic, the magazine's editor, told Reuters.

"He said he was a psychiatrist who does energy therapies. I told him we were not able to pay him and could only give him an issue of the magazine for free.

"He was not physically fit, but I would say he was mentally fit." Kojic said Karadzic did not have a Bosnian accent.

"I asked where he was from and he said he was from the Krajina region. I think he told me he had children. I doubted he had a degree because he didn't specify where he was working. He never showed me his diploma, he said his wife left it in the United States."

As the soft-spoken Dr Dabic, Karadzic held lectures and wrote articles comparing popular meditation techniques with "Orthodox meditation", a silent technique practised by monks in Orthodox monasteries.

He was also interested in healing through the optimal use of "vital energy", a quasi-mystical, non-physical dimension of the body, similar to the Chinese notion of qi and the Indian concept of the chakra centres of energy in the body.

"He was very religious," said a woman who works at the magazine and knew him. "He had his hair in a plait in order to be able to receive different energies. He was a very nice man."

Karadzic appears to have lived comfortably within his new identity and to have moved freely. He liked being with people and getting attention.

An anti-cancer society in the northern town of Sombor still has on its website the announcement of an April lecture of Dr Dragan Dabic on "similarities between meditation and Orthodox meditation". In another lecture programme, he described himself as a "researcher in the fields of psychology and bio-energy".

Serb nationalists denounced his arrest as another capitulation to western pressure, five months after the EU backed Kosovo's declaration of independence.

"This is a dark day in Serbian history. Radovan Karadzic is not a war criminal. He has become a legend," said Tomislav Nikolic of the Radical Party.

While EU leaders and the White House lauded Serbian president Boris Tadic and his new government, Russia issued a terse call for a fair trial for Karadzic at a UN court which it accuses of anti-Serb bias and which it wants to close down as soon as possible.

"We hope that the investigation and trial regarding the case of Karadzic will be unbiased," said Russian foreign ministry spokesman Andrei Nesterenko.

"We reiterate the need to speed up work on winding down the [ UN court] and handing over all cases which have not yet been resolved to the investigative and legal agencies of the countries of former Yugoslavia, which are now mature enough and capable of investigating the situation and delivering verdicts on war crimes on their own."

Russia's envoy to Nato, Dmitry Rogozin, offered a scathing reaction to Karadzic's capture.

"If the Karadzic case deserves to be considered in the Hague, then those people who took the decision to bomb innocent civilians, who were dying by the hundred during the 'democratisation' of the Balkans by the West, should be sitting in the dock next to him," he said.

Karadzic would be the 44th Serb suspect sent to the tribunal in The Hague. The others include former president Slobodan Milosevic, who died there in 2006 while on trial.

Two other suspects remain at large: former Bosnian Serb general Ratko Mladic (66) and Goran Hadzic (49), who headed a breakaway Serb faction in the enclave of Krajina.

- (Additional reporting Reuters)