Captured war crimes suspect Radovan Karadzic led a secret life in Serbia's capital Belgrade practising alternative medicine, it has been revealed.
Serb officials confirmed yesterday that the 63-year-old former psychiatrist, and one of the world's most- wanted men who had been in hiding for more than 10 years, worked incognito at an alternative medicine clinic.
Using an alias and with his appearance transformed from a besuited figure with a shock of silver hair to a man resembling a New Age mystic with a flowing white beard and black robe, he even sat on a panel at a televised medical conference.
Calling himself Dragan Dabic, the former team psychologist of the Red Star Belgrade football club had his own website - www.psy-help-energy.com - gave lectures in front of hundreds of people on alternative medicine and was a regular contributor to the Serbian alternative medicine magazine Healthy Life.
The former Bosnian Serb leader, who denies all the charges against him, was arrested on Monday near Belgrade after more than a decade on the run.
He has been indicted by the UN tribunal for war crimes and genocide relating to the 1992-95 Bosnian war.
The UN says Karadzic's forces killed up to 8000 Bosniak men and boys from Srebrenica in July 1995, Europe's worst carnage since the end of the Second World War, as part of a campaign to "terrorise and demoralise the Bosnian Muslim and Bosnian Croat population".
He has also been charged over the shelling of Sarajevo, which claimed 12,000 lives and the use of 284 UN peacekeepers as human shields in May and June 1995.
By the war's end in late 1995, an estimated 250,000 people were dead and another 1.8 million driven from their homes.
Karadzic's disguise was so effective that prosecutors say he walked freely around town without being noticed and even his landlords did not know his identity.
Meanwhile, a judge has ordered Karadzic's transfer to the UN war crimes court in The Hague.
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