NATO-led troops raided another house belonging to the family of top Bosnian Serb war crimes suspect Radovan Karadzic today but failed again to find the man charged with genocide.
A spokesman for the NATO-led peace force said the latest raid stemmed from intelligence gathered during its operation over the previous three days in the wartime stronghold of Pale - the most extensive search for Karadzic in almost two years.
Captain Dave Sullivan told Reuters the troops questioned someone they found in the abandoned house just outside Pale in today's raid, which began at 1.00 local time, but did not detain them.
About 200 US, British, Italian, German and Bulgarian troops searched Karadzic's wife's house and church and hospital buildings in Pale over the weekend on a tip Karadzic was injured and had sought medical help in his wartime capital.
NATO detained only what it called a "supporter", an ex-paramilitary policeman, but insisted the operation, the first since a two-day raid in a remote eastern village in February 2002, was a success, saying it had gathered useful information.
"This is a result of the information we obtained in Pale," Captain Sullivan said as the latest raid continued into the morning. "Material of potential intelligence value was removed from the house."
Karadzic and his fellow fugitive and wartime military chief Ratko Mladic were twice indicted for genocide by the UN war crimes court, for the siege of Sarajevo and the Srebrenica massacre of about 8,000 Muslims in Bosnia's 1992-5 war.