Radovan Karadzic, one of the world’s most wanted war criminals, has been captured, it was revealed last night.

The Bosnian Serb wartime president could now face a genocide trial at The Hague after 11 years on the run. Karadzic’s arrest and detention by security forces was revealed in a statement from the office of Serbian president Boris Tadic. Karadzic, leader of the ethnic Bosnian Serbs during the 1992-1995 Bosnian war, was indicted by the United Nations war crimes tribunal in The Hague in July 1995.

He is accused of masterminding massacres that the UN war crimes tribunal described as “scene from hell, written on the darkest pages of human history”. Among them was the massacre of 8,000 Muslim men at Srebrenica in 1995. The war crimes tribunal’s head prosecutor Serge Brammertz last night said: ”this is a very important day for the victims who have waited for this arrest for over a decade”.

The US issued a £2.5million bounty for the capture of Karadzic and his army chief Ratko Mladic, who remains at large.