(Left) An April 1996 file picture of former Bosnian Serb President Radovan Karadzic. (Right) An undated picture of Karadzic released by Healthy Life magazine on Tuesday. (AP)

Belgrade, July 22 (Reuters): Bosnian Serb wartime President Radovan Karadzic, indicted for genocide in the Bosnia war, was captured in disguise near Belgrade after 11 years on the run and had been working as a doctor, Serbian officials said today.

The arrest yesterday of Karadzic, who is held responsible for the siege of Sarajevo and the massacre of 8,000 Muslims in the Bosnian town of Srebrenica in 1995, was a condition for Serbian progress towards EU membership.

He is the most prominent Balkan war crimes suspect arrested since late Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic was sent to the UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague on genocide charges in 2001, leaving only two suspects at large.

The Serbian officials said Karadzic, who is also known as the Butcher of Bosnia, was caught while moving from one Belgrade suburb to another. They showed reporters a photograph of an unrecognisable Karadzic, now 63, looking thin, with a long, white beard, flowing hair and thick glasses.

“He happily, freely walked around the city,” Serbia’s war crimes prosecutor, Vladimir Vukcevic, told reporters. “Even his landlords were unaware of his identity.”

Karadzic had wanted Serb areas of Bosnia to be linked to Serbia and other areas dominated by Serbs at a time when Milosevic was fanning nationalism in Serbia.

The trained psychiatrist worked for a private clinic, posing as a specialist in alternative medicine under the assumed name of Dragan Dabic. His last known address was in New Belgrade, a sprawling suburb of concrete tower blocks. Serbian officials said Karadzic had been served with an indictment and his lawyers had three days to appeal. He is expected to be transferred to The Hague later.

When news of his arrest spread, people in the Bosnian capital Sarajevo poured onto the streets in celebration.

His troops shelled Sarajevo mercilessly in a 43-month siege that lasted throughout the 1992-95 Bosnian war and killed some 11,000 people. Residents haggled for food and scurried like rats over exposed street crossings to avoid snipers’ bullets.

“I called and woke up my whole family,” said Sarajevo resident Fadil Bico as cars honked horns and Bosnian state radio played excerpts of Karadzic’s wartime hate speeches. EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana said his arrest showed Belgrade was cooperating fully with the UN war crimes court.

EU foreign ministers were due to discuss closer ties with Serbia’s new, pro-western government. UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon praised Belgrade for taking a “decisive step towards ending impunity” of war crime suspects in the Balkan wars.

Karadzic was indicted in 1995 along with his army commander, General Ratko Mladic, for genocide in Sarajevo and Srebrenica, where unarmed Bosnian Muslim males were rounded up, murdered and bulldozed into mass graves.

Richard Holbrooke, US envoy during the wars of the 1990s, described Karadzic as “a real, true architect of mass murder”.

Munira Subasic, head of a Srebrenica widows’ association said the arrest “is confirmation that every criminal will eventually face justice”.

“I hope that people who had to keep quiet because of Karadzic will start revealing the locations of mass graves and let us find the truth about our loved ones,” she said.