For 11 years Europe’s most wanted man has evaded capture, moving from one mountain hideout to another.

SAS and Nato troops have repeatedly found that the loyalty of those Bosnian Serbs shielding Radovan Karadzic have thwarted their attempts to arrest him.

Ever since he went into hiding in 1996 after being forced to stand down as leader of the Bosnian Serbs, he has been protected by a guard of 80 armed men who were ruthless in their determination to keep him safe.

They were so successful that the psychiatrist, poet and war crimes suspect was able regularly to visit his wife with no danger of being caught. He even managed to publish a book, Miraculous Chronicles of the Night, a novel set in 1980s Yugoslavia while on the run.

Moving across the snow covered Vucevo mountain from freezing cabin to churches, there were regular sightings. Sometimes he was spotted brazenly driving a bright orange military Jeep, walking with his wife or setting up a camp in the village of Rudo. In 1999 a Serbian film director who secured an interview with him recalled how he appeared relaxed as he sat drinking wine, welcoming visitors and flicking from one television channel to another or using his computer.

At the turn of the Millennium, his mother said he had gone back to his people, and admitted she would rather shoot him than see him handed over to the Hague.

In an interview with The Times, shortly before he went into hiding, he remained bullish and arrogant.

"If The Hague was a real judicial body I would be ready to go there to testify or do so on television, but it is a political body that has been created to blame the Serbs.”

Born in a stable in Savnik, Montenegro in 1945, Karadzic quickly learned the values of Serbian nationalism during his early years with his poor family. His father, Vuk, was a member of the Chetniks, the remnants of the army of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, who was wounded in the Second World War in battles against Nazi occupiers and Tito partisans.

His mother, Jovanka, said she brought up her son to be loyal to his family. She said he was a hard worker who helped in the home.

In 1960 he moved to Sarajevo and studied medicine to become a psychologist at a city hospital.

It was while in the city that he met his wife, Ljiljana, and, in the early 1970’s began writing poetry. It was then that he fell under the spell of Dobrica Cosic, a Serb nationalist writer who encouraged him to pursue his fervent belief in a greater Serbia by becoming a politician.

Sentenced in 1985 to three years imprisonment for embezzlement and fraud, a sentence he served only briefly, he continued to work as a psychiatrist until embarking on his political career just before the war in Bosnia began.

After a brief spell with the Green Party, he played an important role in setting up the Serbian Democratic Party (SDS), created in 1990 in an attempt to halt the rise of the Croat parties in Bosnia.

Nearly two years later, as Bosnia-Hercegovina was recognised as an independent state, he declared himself the leader of the new Serbian Republic of Bosnia and Hercegovina, with Sarajevo as its capital. The move triggered one of the bloodiest wars in modern Europe.

His masterplan to “ethnically cleanse” the Muslims of Bosnia saw him set up the Omarska detention camp. One survivor of that camp, Rezak Hukanovic, described in his book, The Tenth Circle of Hell the torments suffered by the inmates of that camp: “Thirst, hunger, gang rapes, exhaustion, skulls shattered, sexual organs torn out, stomachs ripped open by the soldier assassins of Radovan Karadzic.”

As the leader of the SDS and President of the Bosnian Serb Administration during the war, Karadzic was in a superior position to the Bosnian Serb General Ratko Mladic, a fellow indictee, and every member of the wartime Bosnian Serb Government. It was for that reason that he became the UN’s most wanted war crimes suspect.

Among the 16 counts on Karadzic’s indictment for genocide and crimes against humanity are the massacre of at least 6,000 Muslims in Srebrenica in July 1995, the shelling of Sarajevo, and the use of 284 UN peacekeepers as human shields in May and June 1995.

In July 1996 he stepped down as president of the SDS as the West stepped up pressure against the republic of Bosnia and Hercegovina, renamed the Republika Srpska.

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