Radovan Karadzic became the Scarlet Pimpernel of the Balkans for more than a decade, switching identities, locations and changing his appearance to avoid arrest and escape the justice of The Hague war-crimes tribunal.

At one stage, he shaved his head and donned a Serbian Orthodox priest's robes, moving between remote monasteries and logging cabins in the mountains of Bosnia's north-east.

He was also understood to be writing his memoirs during periods of refuge at one monastery near Vilusin in the range of hills that separate Montenegro from Kosovo and trying to justify his role as the architect of ethnic cleansing and genocide.

When he was caught on Monday night on a bus near Belgrade, he sported a long white beard and was carrying false documents identifying him as Dragan Dabic, a doctor specialising in alternative medicine and psychology working at a private clinic.

His arrest followed a period of surveillance by Belgrade's own security services and was timed for maximum political and diplomatic impact on pending negotiations to join the EU and reap the perceived economic benefits of membership.

The replacement of the old head of Serbian intelligence, Rade Bulatovic, with a new, more pro-Western man, Sasha Vukadinovic, also played a significant role.

That appointment was only made public last week, clearing the way for a snatch operation many in Europe believed would never be sanctioned for fear of a nationalist backlash.

The final green light for the arrest and handover came after both France and the Netherlands warned the Serbian government that their country would remain a pariah state unless the last major war criminals from the Balkan wars were delivered this year.

Ratko Mladic, the Bosnian Serb general also indicted for the massacre of Muslims at Srebrenica, is now Europe's most-wanted man. If Karazdic was the policy-maker for the pogroms, which killed 250,000 and turned 1.8 million into refugees, Mladic represented the Bosnian Serb military's instrument of terror in the killing fields.

But while the former president had lost much of his public support in a Serbia increasingly looking forwards rather than back, Mladic remains the archetypal national Serb hero to many. He was the man who led the invasion of Croatia and cleared the Muslims from huge swathes of Bosnia.

Bringing him to book could involve tangling with the top brass of the former Yugoslav republic's still powerful armed forces. That may be a step too far for the fledgling government.

In the late 1990s, Karadzic used safehouses in and around Foca, a mountain village on the edge of the Sutjeska national park where the population was exclusively Serb, ferociously nationalist and intensely loyal to their former president. Journalists who tried to discover his whereabouts were routinely threatened by the locals. Even a £1.75m bounty offered by the US failed to tempt the hardliners of the region to betray a man they still regarded as iconic.

On at least one occasion, he was pinpointed by an SAS snatch-squad at a cafe in Pale. But an arrest attempt was called off because of the fear of civilian casualties in a shoot-out.

Karadzic, at that stage, always travelled with a 30-strong contingent of bodyguards drawn from the ranks of battle-hardened veterans.

But for most of a decade as a hunted man, Karadzic lived suspiciously free from fear of retribution. He even managed to publish a novel set in 1980s Yugoslavia.

In 1999 a Serbian film director who interviewed him recalled how he appeared relaxed as he sat drinking wine. In Pale, he drank in bars frequented by off-duty French peacekeepers.

A French intelligence officer with Serb sympathies, Major Herve Gourmelon, even informed Karadzic about Operation Amber Star, a Nato scheme to kidnap him in 1997, prompting his move from Pale deeper into the Serb heartland.

Nato's rules of engagement added to The Hague prosecutors' frustrations, stipulating that troops could apprehend war crime suspects only if they encountered them by chance.

There was no remit for any seek-and-destroy mission which would inevitably jeopardise the entire peace process of the time and antagonise a steadfastly pro-Serb Russia.

The French, despite their symathies, thought of going it alone with straightforward assassination to solve the impasse. Snipers from the elite counter-terrorist section of the Foreign Legion's Parachute Regiment reputedly had both Mladic and Karadzic in their crosshairs on at least two occasions. But the green light was never given.

THE CHARGES

The UN war crimes tribunal charged former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic with 15 counts of genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and other atrocities committed between 1992 and 1996: