NATO swoop for Karadzic helpers

Karadzic: Wanted and on the run

SARAJEVO, Bosnia -- NATO troops launched a swoop on a remote Bosnian village in a search targeting people helping Serb war crimes suspect Radovan Karadzic remain a fugitive.

Residents in Celebici, where the NATO-led Stabilisation Force (SFOR) tried to catch the wartime Bosnian Serb leader earlier this year, said dozens of armoured vehicles blocked roads to the village near the mountainous Montenegrin border.

Karadzic, twice indicted by the U.N. war crimes tribunal for genocide during the 1992-1995 war, is widely believed to be hiding in eastern Bosnia or in his native Montenegro, Serbia's smaller partner in the Yugoslav federation. (Karadzic profile)

But an SFOR spokesman said the soldiers -- believed to be mostly French and German -- were not looking for Karadzic this time, as it was in two failed raids in Celebici in February and March.

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"The focus is on the network of peoples and places -- all the things that allow Karadzic to remain at large," spokesman Scott Lundy told Reuters. "The action does not represent a search for Radovan Karadzic."

Lundy said the force launched the operation after receiving information about Karadzic's support network, adding it involved large number of troops, vehicles and helicopters and that it might last several days.

Human rights activists and Bosnian Muslims have criticised NATO for failing to capture Karadzic and his wartime military chief Ratko Mladic. In July, peacekeepers swooped on Karadzic's family house in the mountain town of Pale near Sarajevo.

Karadzic and Mladic are indicted for the 1995 massacre of up to 8,000 Muslim men and boys in the town of Srebrenica and the siege of Sarajevo.

Investigators secure the entrance of Karadzic's house in last month's raid

Karadzic is the U.N. court's most wanted war crimes suspect but he remains popular among nationalist Serbs, especially in eastern Bosnia still politically controlled by hard-liners.

U.N. war crimes prosecutor Carla del Ponte has said she wants him to face a joint trial in October with his wartime associates Biljana Plavsic and Momcilo Krajisnik. SFOR detained Krajisnik in April 2000 and Plavsic surrendered early last year.