Radovan Karadzic was arrested in a suburb of Belgrade where he lived posing as a doctor of alternative medicine, sporting long hair, a beard and glasses to hide his face, officials said yesterday.
A picture shown to reporters showed an unrecognisable Mr Karadzic, markedly thin, with a long white beard and flowing hair. He was arrested while moving from one place to another.
"He was using false documents under the name of Dragan Dabic," said Rasim Ljajic, Serbia's point-man for cooperation with the UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague. "He was very convincing in hiding his identity, he earned his living practising alternative medicine, working in a private clinic."
Karadzic's last known address was in New Belgrade, a sprawling suburb of massive concrete tower blocks that can house dozens of flats.
War crimes prosecutor Vladimir Vukcevic said authorities could not divulge details of the Monday evening operation because it might jeopardise efforts to arrest two other war crime suspects on the run.
"He walked around freely, even appeared in public places. The people who rented him the apartment did not know his true identity," Mr Vukcevic said.
Factbox
• Karadzic was born on June 19, 1945 in a tiny hamlet in the mountains of Montenegro and raised in poverty by parents who despised the communist rule of Yugoslav President Josip Broz Tito. His father was a Serb nationalist fighter wounded by Tito's partisans at the close of World War II.
• He became a professional psychiatrist specialising in neurosis and depression and an amateur poet whose works had a fantastical, morbid tinge. His soft, smiling face and shaggy mane of grey hair gave him a deceptive credibility at first as Bosnian Serb leader. But the world soon changed its opinion.
• On the eve of war in 1992, Mr Karadzic warned against plans to declare Bosnia a sovereign state. It would lead the country into hell and perhaps "make the Muslim people disappear, because the Muslims cannot defend themselves if there is war", he said.
• He was indicted by the UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague in July 1995 for authorising the shooting of civilians during the 43-month siege of Sarajevo. He was indicted for genocide a second time four months later for orchestrating the slaughter of some 8,000 Muslim men after Mr Mladic's forces seized the UN "safe area" of Srebrenica in eastern Bosnia.
• In 1997, two years after Nato intervention ended the war, he lost power, went underground and became the quarry in a lengthy manhunt. To this day, loyalists see him as a saviour and a hero hounded by foreign powers blind to mortal dangers Serbdom faced at the hands of Bosnia's Muslims. His face is printed on calendars and T-shirts. His books sell in church bookshops.
• There were regular reported "sightings" of Mr Karadzic over the years, none confirmed. He was supposedly seen in April 2005 lunching with his wife, undisguised, and allegedly attended his mother's funeral in Niksic, Montenegro, disguised as a priest a month later.