Radovan Karadzic, Europe's Most Wanted Man, Arrested for War Crimes

One of the world's most wanted men, the former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, was arrested last night in Serbia after more than 12 years on the run from charges of genocide and war crimes.

The man indicted for the Srebrenica massacre and the Sarajevo siege, among other war crimes, was arrested by Serbian security officers and taken before a war crimes court in Belgrade, according to a statement from the office of the Serbian president, Boris Tadic.

According to initial reports, Karadzic had been under surveillance for several weeks after a tip-off from an unnamed foreign intelligence agency, and had been picked up in Belgrade. Last night he was undergoing a formal identification process, including DNA testing, and was scheduled to meet investigators overnight.

Richard Holbrooke, the American diplomat who helped negotiate an end to the Bosnian war, described him as the Osama bin Laden of Europe, and "a real, true architect of mass murder".

The prosecutor's office at the war crimes tribunal in The Hague said it expected Karadzic to be handed over "in due course".

The prosecutor, Serge Brammertz issued a statement welcoming the arrest and congratulating the Serb authorities.

"This is a very important day for the victims who have waited for this arrest for over a decade," he said. "It is also an important day for international justice because it clearly demonstrates that nobody is beyond the reach of the law and that sooner or later all fugitives will be brought to justice."

Karadzic's wife, Ljiljana, told the Associated Press by phone from her home in Karadzic's former stronghold, Pale, near Sarajevo, that her daughter Sonja had called her before midnight. "As the phone rang, I knew something was wrong," she said. "I'm shocked. Confused. At least now we know he is alive."

Karadzic faces charges of genocide and crimes against humanity inflicted on Bosnian Muslim, Bosnian Croat and other non-Serb civilians in Bosnia and Herzegovina during the 1992-1995 war, when he was president of the breakaway Republika Srpska.

The charge sheet includes the murder of nearly 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica, after the supposedly UN-protected enclave fell to Bosnian Serb forces. The former psychiatrist and aspiring poet is also charged with running death camps for non-Serbs, and the shelling and sniping on civilians in the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo, in a siege that lasted more than three years.

After the Dayton peace agreement in 1995, Karadzic vanished along with his military commander, General Ratko Mladic. Mladic is still at large but the chances of his capture appear to have increased significantly with the shift in the political tides in Belgrade.

Earlier this month, a democratically-elected, pro-western government came to power, a 10-party coalition run by a moderate former finance minister, Mirko Cvetkovic, and aligned with the reformist president, Tadic.

Cvetkovic and Tadic came to office with a mandate for reforms and closer ties with the EU. Cvetkovic had promised formal EU candidate status within a year, and full membership within five years, but one of the European conditions for closer ties was action against Karadzic and Mladic. The arrest came on the eve of a meeting of EU foreign ministers to discuss ties with Serbia.

After the Bosnian war, it had long been assumed Mladic had gone to live in Serbia under the protection of retired and serving military officers, while it was widely thought Karadzic had stayed behind hiding in Republika Srpska.

In Sarajevo last night, there were celebrations in the street when the news broke, and cars drove through the center of the town honking their horns. Belgrade was meanwhile braced for a backlash by radical nationalists who remain a potent force in Serbian politics, particularly after Kosovo's secession this year.