Karadzic arrest like catching Osama

“The four years that I was working with Nato to try and catch him were peppered by rumours of where he was - in this cafe, on that mountain, in this valley.” Video Watch Karadzic’s lawyer slam arrest “

Ashdown also told Britain’s Daily Telegraph newspaper that it was a “major breakthrough for the Balkans region.”

In Brussels, the European Union’s foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, sounded hopeful that the arrest would unblock Serbia’s EU accession talks, which had been made conditional on Belgrade’s cooperation with the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY).

“We have to talk to the prosecutor of the international tribunal but I am almost certain he is going to say there is ‘full cooperation’,” Solana said.

That reaction was echoed across European capitals, the United Nations and the White House, but with a dissident note coming from Russia’s envoy to Nato, who called for Western leaders to join Karadzic in the dock.

“If the Karadzic case merits being considered in the Hague, then next to him in the dock should be those who took the decision to bomb entirely innocent people, hundreds of whom died during the ‘democratisation’ of the Balkans by the West,” Dmitry Rogozin said in Brussels, cited by Interfax news agency.