Radovan Karadzic, one of the world’s most wanted men, was arrested yesterday 13 years after he was first indicted by the United Nations War Crimes Tribunal.

The 63-year-old war crimes suspect faces genocide charges for his role in the massacre of more than 8,000 Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica in Europe’s worst atrocity since the Second World War, and for organising the siege of Sarajevo which claimed 12,000 lives.

He was understood to have been brought before a hastily-convened court in Belgrade last night after he was seized by Serb forces inside the country, according to Boris Tadic, the President.

The arrest is a significant breakthrough for the new pro-western government in Serbia, a country which has faced international isolation while Karadzic and fellow war crimes suspect Ratko Mladic, the Bosnian Serb army commander, have remained at large.

The EU has made their hand-over a condition of progressing towards membership talks.

Radovan Karadzic led the self-proclaimed Serb administration of Bosnia in the early 1990s which resisted the country’s independence and suppressed other ethnic groups in some of the worst violence that followed the break-up of Yugoslavia.

He is likely to be put on trial at The Hague in the most high-profile prosecution arising from the Balkans conflict since that of Slobodan Milosevic ended with the death from natural causes of the former Serb president in 2006 before a verdict could be reached.

“This is a very important day for the victims who have waited for this arrest for over a decade,” said Serge Brammertz, chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia.

“It is also an important day for international justice because it clearly demonstrates that nobody is beyond the reach of the law and that sooner or later all fugitives will be brought to justice.”

Richard Holbrooke, the former US assistant secretary of state who negotiated the 1995 Dayton accords that ended the war in Bosnia, described Karadzic as “a real true architect of mass murder” and hailed the news of his arrest as “a tremendous step forward for Serbia’s desire to join the West”.

He said: “This is the most wanted man in Europe, the Osama bin Laden of Europe. He has evaded capture for almost 13 years. He was the primary intellectual architect of the ethnic cleansing.”

Lord Ashdown of Norton-sub-Hamdon, the international community’s former High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina, called the arrest as an “extremely important piece of justice for the world at large”.

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