RADOVAN KARADZIC, Europe’s most-wanted man, picked his ears with a pencil during presidential meetings, scattered dandruff and bit his fingernails until they bled.

The former Bosnian Serb leader was also a war profiteer and traitor who, during his eight years on the run, has been sending forged documents to the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague in an apparent attempt to evade genocide charges.

The revelations come from Biljana Plavsic, his former deputy and close ally during the Bosnian war who later succeeded him as President.

Ms Plavsic, once known as the Serb Iron Lady for her hardline nationalist views, is the most senior politician to be convicted by the Hague tribunal. She is now serving 11 years in a Swedish jail and passing the time writing her memoirs.

To judge by the portrait she paints of Dr Karadzic in the first volume, I Testify, she could prove a powerful witness if her former leader is ever caught.

Her charges range from the personal to the political. “The continuous picking of his ears with a pencil, spreading dandruff from his hair, biting his nails until they bled and his changing day to night, was drawing more and more attention from people,” she writes.

“It could have demonstrated some serious disorder. It is not his fault, but the President should not be like that.”

He was often late for meetings. “Presidency meetings were supposed to be held every day at 11am. Everybody was on time, except the President . . . who was regularly late between one and two hours,” she states.Dr Karadzic’s wife used to cover for his failure. “On two or three occasions, I personally called his house and his wife always gave the same, short answer, ‘ Radovan is sleeping’, and then she would just hang up.”

More seriously, she alleges that Dr Karadzic and his family profited from the war. “His ideal model of a good leader is a profiteer who, in an irregular way, gets rich overnight. The type of people who do not respect the law and rules, and use war and the tragedy of their people to smuggle humanitarian aid and become millionaires within two or three months. He was fascinated by those people. He admired them, he hung out with them and he followed in their footsteps”.

She also alleges that Dr Karadzic has been in regular contact with the Hague tribunal, sending it documents that he had forged. “These minutes and the other documents with Karadzic’s signature are interesting because he, in order to send them as quickly as possible to The Hague, signed them as ‘President of the Serb Republic’ when we did not even have a president at the time and the official name was not ‘Serb Republic’ but ‘the Serb Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina’.”

Dr Karadzic, 59, has been charged with genocide by the tribunal at The Hague for crimes such as the massacre of nearly 8,000 Muslims at the town of Srebrenica. He is believed to be hiding in the mountains of southeast Bosnia.

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