Top Bosnian Serb war crimes fugitive Karadzic arrested

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"Karadzic was located and arrested," President Boris Tadic said in a terse statement on Monday night that Bosnian Muslims had begun to despair of ever hearing.

It brought people out in the night onto the streets of Sarajevo, the city his troops shelled mercilessly during a 43-month siege, to celebrate the capture of the man charged with authorising the slaughter of 11,000 of their fellow citizens.

"I called and woke up my whole family," said Sarajevo resident Fadil Bico, as cars streamed through the streets honking horns and Bosnian state radio played excerpts of Karadzic's wartime hate speeches.

Serbian government sources said Karadzic had been under surveillance in Serbia for several weeks, after a tip-off from a foreign intelligence service.

He did not resist arrest, they said. His lawyer, Svetozar Vujacic, told reporters Karadzic was arrested on Friday night, while taking a bus between two suburbs of Belgrade, and had been held for three days before the announcement.

His arrest was one of the main conditions of Serbian progress towards European Union (EU) membership, which most of its people desire.

Richard Holbrooke, former U.S. Balkan troubleshooter during the wars of the 1990s' described Karadzic as the Osama bin Laden of Europe," a real, true architect of mass murder".

Karadzic went underground more than a year after Holbrooke negotiated the 1995 Dayton accords that ended the war in Bosnia and NATO deployed a huge force of peacekeepers in early 1996.

Alleged sightings were rare. He was said to be hiding in monasteries, disguised, shuttling among remote hideouts with the help of a network of diehard loyalists.

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