Police: We let wanted Karadzic walk free

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Austrian police have admitted arresting Radovan Karadzic with a fake Croatian passport in the name of Pete Actor – but letting him go again after finding nothing suspicious.

The blunder came after armed members of the country’s elite Cobra special troops raided a flat in the Rudolfsheim area of Vienna where Karadzic was asleep and dragged him out of bed at gunpoint.

Police had been drafted in to search the place after a tip-off that a wanted killer was hiding there.

Two Serbian men had been drinking and playing cards the night before, when one shot the other dead.

Police suspected that the killer, a 58-year-old Serbian man who was later caught at a nearby pub, was hiding at his girlfriend’s apartment. Self-proclaimed wonder healer Pete Actor was also staying at the property.

A police spokesman said that after questioning Karadzic, who was ‘very helpful’, they released him on May 4 last year. He added that officers ‘were not to know’ it was him.

The woman who gave Karadzic shelter, Vesna Janovic, 53, said: ‘We had no idea that the man we knew as grandfather Pera was a wanted war criminal. He always had a Bible by his side.’

Austrian police have admitted that they did not check the passport – and took his word when he said he had nothing to do with the murder.