PALE, Bosnia-Hercegovina (AFP)--NATO peacekeepers in Bosnia Tuesday raided the home of Radovan Karadzic's wife Ljiljana and interviewed members of his family over suspected links with war crimes fugitive Ratko Mladic, a force spokesman said.
Troops entered the home in Pale, some 20 kilometers east of Sarajevo, around 3 am and searched it for several hours, North Atlantic Treaty Organization spokesman Derek Chappell told AFP.
"We have reason to believe that Karadzic's and Mladic's network overlap...and we wanted to talk to members of Karadzic family about possible communication with Mladic's support network," Chappel said.
"It was a very worthwhile operation," he added without elaborating.
Prior to Karadzic's arrest in Belgrade last July Bosnian peacekeepers often conducted raids on the homes of his relatives in Pale to put pressure on networks that had been helping him to evade justice.
"This operation targets the Karadzic family in order to continue pressure on us and indirectly to disturb his defense before The Hague (U.N. warcrimes) tribunal. Obviously they can do whatever they want," Karadzic's daughter Sonja told AFP.
"They asked us about Mladic and Hadzic although it is clear that we are not in contact with them just as we had not been in contact with my father," she added.
The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, or ICTY, has been seeking Mladic, the Bosnian Serb army chief, since the end of Bosnia's 1992-1995 war.
One of only two remaining fugitives still wanted by the ICTY along with former Croatian Serb leader Goran Hadzic, he is believed to be hiding in neighboring Serbia.
Mladic and Karadzic have been indicted for some of Europe's worst atrocities since World War II, notably the 1995 Srebrenica massacre of 8,000 Bosnian Muslims and the siege of Sarajevo that claimed more than 10,000 lives.
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(END) Dow Jones Newswires
December 02, 2008 03:31 ET (08:31 GMT)

Publié le 02 Décembre 2008 Copyright © 2008 Dowjones