| Karadzic manages
to elude US forces Mar 14, 2004 |
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| BIJELJINA, Bosnia – US forces
in Bosnia are pulling out the stops to grab top war crimes fugitive
Radovan Karadzic to help George W. Bush in the US presidential race,
according to a suspect recently interrogated by them.Dusko Tesic, who was
arrested in January by Stabilisation Force (SFOR) troops, said the United
States would love to match the capture of Saddam Hussein in his Iraqi
“spider hole” last December but do not know where Karadzic is.“They’re
straining at the leash to get at Radovan,” Tesic told Reuters in an
interview this week after 34 days in US custody, sometimes shackled and
handcuffed, on suspicion of helping Karadzic avoid capture. He was
released without charge. Tesic says he was held at the U.S. Eagle Base in Bosnia, where NATO-led troops have kept the peace since 1996.Criticised for not doing enough, SFOR has recently intensified efforts to catch Karadzic, the former Bosnian Serb president, targeting suspected helpers.“But don’t think it is NATO who is after him,” Tesic said. “All this intensified effort is solely a U.S. enterprise.”The Bosnian Serb former policeman said he was interrogated by agents of the Central Intelligence Agency and Defence Intelligence Agency for clues to Karadzic’s whereabouts.“They told me SFOR Commander (U.S. General Virgil) Packett has promised President Bush he’ll get Karadzic,” said Tesic.Sending the top fugitive to The Hague war crimes tribunal would not only be cause for celebration at SFOR but also allow the United States to plan a troop departure from Bosnia. Many Bosnian Serbs resent NATO’s presence.SFOR spokesman Captain Dave Sullivan, a Canadian, said that whatever Tesic might say, he had provided “very useful information” to his interrogators. He did not elaborate.Now 59 and with a $5 million price on his head, Karadzic is still a hero to many Serbs despite his alleged role in the massacre of thousands of Muslims in Bosnia’s 1992-95 war. Suspected sympathisers can be penalised by travel bans and asset freezes.Tesic said he was snatched by U.S. soldiers in plain clothes outside a ski hotel near Karadzic’s wartime stronghold of Pale, then hooded and bundled into a helicopter.“If they think they’ll find Karadzic by following me, then they don’t know where he is. They’re lost. They don’t even know if he is in the Balkans,” he said. – Reuters |
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