International officials in Bosnia say Radovan Karadzic's property may be confiscated and used toward US$4.5 billion compensation a U.S. court ordered him to pay to victims of wartime atrocities, a Bosnian newspaper reported Friday.
Through the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights, victims who fled to the U.S. during the Bosnian 1992-95 war in which more than 100,000 people were killed, sought compensation from Karadzic. A jury decided on the sum of US$4.5 billion in 2000.
The Bosnian Serb wartime leader was a fugitive for more than 12 years until his capture Monday.
Raffi Gregorian, deputy to Bosnia's international administrator Miroslav Lajcak, was quoted by the daily Dnevni Avaz on Friday as saying that options are being considered on how to confiscate Karadzic's property in order to pay "a partial, or at least a symbolic compensation."
"Karadzic owes several billion dollars to his victims. ... This is why EUFOR (the European Union Force) recently even measured his house in Pale," Gregorian was quoted as saying.
It is not know how much property Karadzic owns.
The newspaper says it is likely that the property of Karadzic's family as well as of all those who were part of his support network that helped him evade justice for 13 years, may end up on the confiscation list.
Repeated efforts to confirm the report with Gregorian's office on Friday failed.
Oleg Milisic, Lajcak's spokesman, told The Associated Press on Friday that "This is a complex matter of law and we cannot comment further on this at this stage."
Karadzic was arrested in Belgrade on Monday evening and is waiting to be extradited to the U.N. war crimes tribunal in The Hague, Netherlands. There he faces 11 counts of war crimes, including genocide against some 8,000 Muslim men from Srebrenica _ victims of the worst massacre in Europe since World War II.
The civil lawsuits filed by human rights groups in the name of Bosnians who fled the war to the United States alleged that Karadzic personally planned and ordered murder, rape, forced impregnation and other forms of torture designed to destroy religious and ethnic groups.
He was represented in the case until 1997 by lawyer Ramsey Clark when Karadzic informed the court that he was dropping his defense against what he called an unjust U.S. lawsuit.
In 1995, after the Bosnian war ended, the U.N. war crimes tribunal indicted Karadzic on war crimes charges. Being the president of the newly established Bosnian Serb ministate Republika Srpska, Karadzic was not arrested for two years. In 1997 he lost power and went into hiding.
