BOSNIA/FILE: NATO troops raid homes of the son and daughter of fugitive Bosnian Serb war crimes suspect Radovan Karadzic

NATO troops raided the homes of the son and daughter of fugitive Bosnian Serb war crimes suspect Radovan Karadzic, looking for information on his whereabouts. NATO raided the homes of the son and daughter of fugitive Bosnian Serb war crimes suspect Radovan Karadzic early on Tuesday (February 20). Alliance forces stationed in Bosnia said they had intelligence that Sonja and Sasa Karadzic were involved in their father's support network. NATO headquarters spokesman Derek Chappell said they had "very productive interviews with both parties" after the operation ended shortly after 9 a.m. (0800 GMT), but refused to go into details. He said troops, mostly U.S. officers backed up by Italian Carabinieri paramilitaries and Serb police, had to force their way into Sonja's home because no one answered the door, but there was no resistance and no one was injured. "NATO is here to search the homes of Sonia and Sasa Karadzic. We are doing so because we have strong beliefs that they are involved in the support network that allows Radovan to stay at large. At the present time we are in both of their homes, we entered them at about 3 o'clock. At Sasa's location it is a very quiet and peaceful entry, at Sonia we did have to force the door, we are now interviewing both parties and we are searching their homes, and the search is going peacefully," Chappell said Reuters television footage showed slight crowbar damage to the front door of the building and the door of Sonja's apartment. Inside the apartment, clothes and other possessions were scattered around. The footage also showed one photograph and one painting of Karadzic. Sonja did not want to speak to reporters about the raid. The overnight swoop on Pale, a small town some 15 km (nine miles) east of Sarajevo, was "not an arrest operation", he said. Dozens of Italian Carabinieri paramilitary troops stood guard on a chilly night around the two apartment blocks. The homes of the two have been raided in the past and Sasa has been detained for questioning. Karadzic was indicted for genocide in 1995 by the U.N. war crimes court for responsibility for the siege of Sarajevo and the massacre of 8,000 Muslims in the enclave of Srebrenica in the 1992-95 Bosnian war. Some reports say he has been hiding in Bosnia, Serbia and Montenegro since. NATO has raided the homes of his family and alleged supporters and launched raids in several failed attempts to seize him. Chappell said the raid was carried out with the support of the Hague-based U.N. court, which is set to close down in 2010. Chief U.N. prosecutor Carla del Ponte has often criticised NATO and EU troops for not doing enough to arrest Karadzic. But Chappell says NATO remains committed to its mission. "Most of the comments from the international community are in effect that neither Mladic nor Karadzic are in this country. NATO in Sarajevo has a mission specifically within Bosnia and Herzegovina. If these men are in some other country there isn't a great deal that we in Sarajevo can do about it. That's the matter for the international politics and diplomacy," Chappell said. The Bosnian Serb wartime leader Karadzic, and his wartime military chief Ratko Mladic, who del Ponte says is in Serbia, are the most senior of six remaining Serb war crimes suspects still at large.

ITN Source | February 20, 2007

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