SERBIA:RADOVAN KARADZIC, the former Bosnian Serb leader accused of genocide, is hoping to delay his extradition until after a nationalist rally in Belgrade this evening in the face of government attempts to spirit him away immediately to The Hague.
"The government is doing all it can to extradite him to The Hague before the rally," Svetozar Vujacic, Mr Karadzic's lawyer, said yesterday. "Radovan's and my goal is that this does not happen."
Mystery surrounds Mr Karadzic's appeal against extradition, with Serbian post offices claiming to not yet have handled the letter of appeal, which must be sent to the Belgrade special court.
Mr Vujacic said he had sent the letter "from a very remote post office" on Friday - the latest possible time under Serbian law, hoping to delay the process.
"At the end of working hours, nothing had arrived," Ivana Ramic, spokeswoman for the Belgrade special court, said yesterday.
Serbia's new government is keen to send Mr Karadzic to The Hague without delay. Lawyers for war crimes indictees have often raised questions about the timing and circumstances of arrests and extraditions. Secret exits, disguised vehicles and decoy motorcades could prevent anyone from actually seeing the extradition.
Meanwhile, police searched the apartment where Mr Karadzic had been living and found copies of documents from the Bosnian Serb army headquarters, along with handwritten notes and photos, Ivica Dacic, the interior minister, said at a parliamentary committee meeting.
Mr Dacic is the leader of the Socialist party - the former party of Slobodan Milosevic, the Yugoslav president ousted in 2000, who died in March 2006 in The Hague before a verdict in his genocide trial.
The party has, nonetheless, now become a crucial partner in the pro-EU government formed earlier this month with anti-Milosevic parties. - (Financial Times service)