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Great escapes of the last 50 yrs
23/07/2008 12:30 - (SA)
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| Bosnian Serb Leader Radovan Karadzic is seen in an April 1996 file photo, and again in an undated photo released on 22 July 2008. (AP Photo) |
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Paris - Former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, who was arrested on Monday, is one of several prominent figures who long eluded international justice.
Many Nazi war criminals escaped in the confusion at the end of World War II, seeking protection from friendly regimes in Latin America and the Middle East.
Of these, the most wanted was Adolf Eichmann, the architect of the Jewish Holocaust, who was tracked to Buenos Aires by the Israeli secret service, captured in 1960, bundled onto an aircraft and hanged in Israel in 1962.
Klaus Barbie, the head of the Gestapo in the French city of Lyon in the second world war went to ground in Bolivia where he was protected under a false name by successive military dictatorships. But France succeeded in extraditing him in 1983. He was condemned to life in prison for crimes against humanity in 1987 and died in jail.
Erich Priebke, a high-ranking SS official who was held responsible for a wartime massacre in Rome made the mistake of giving a television interview in Argentina in 1994, leading to his arrest, extradition and sentencing to life imprisonment.
Josef Mengele, who selected prisoners for the gas chambers at the Auschwitz death camp and carried out experiments on camp inmates, eluded attempts to capture him in Paraguay and Brazil, where he is believed to have drowned in an accident in 1979.
Che Guevara
Although many prominent Nazis lived hidden for much of their lives in Latin America, the continent was not big enough for the Argentine-born Cuban revolutionary leader Ernesto Che Guevara.
After leaving Cuba in 1965 to export the Communist revolution to Latin America, he was hunted by the armed forces of virtually every country with the help of the US Central Intelligence Agency. After failing to win any support for the revolution, he was captured in Bolivia and shot by the army in 1967.
Another famous Latin American, Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, better known as Carlos the Jackal, evaded a massive global manhunt for 20 years. He was wanted for a series of dramatic terrorist attacks including the hijacking of an oil ministers' meeting in Vienna in 1975. Captured in Sudan, he was sentenced to life imprisonment in France in 1997.
Sabri al-Banna, better known as Abu Nidal, the leader of the Fatah Revolutionary Council group which broke away Yasser Arafat's mainstream Palestinian Liberation Organisation, and who was held responsible for about 900 deaths in 20 countries, evaded all attempts to capture him and died in Baghdad in 2002.
Another prominent Palestinian, Abu Abbas, was sought by the United States for nearly 20 years for the hijacking of the Italian liner Achille Lauro in 1985 and the killing of a wheelchair-bound American passenger. He was captured by the US army in Baghdad in 2003 and died in prison last year.
Saddam Hussein
After invading Iraq, the United States published a deck of cards with pictures and the names of the fifty people it most wanted to arrest, headed by fallen president Saddam Hussein, who was captured eight months after the invasion and hanged after going on trial. Saddam's two sons were killed in July 2003 in a shootout in Mosul.
Cambodia's overthrown dictator, Pol Pot, responsible for the death of some 1.5 million of his compatriots, spent 18 years in fortified encampments in the forests of Thailand before his death in 1998.
The arrest by Serbia of Karadzic leaves Bosnian Serb wartime military chief Ratko Mladic still on the run 13 years after being indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in the Hague.
Karadzic and Mladic are accused of genocide in connection with the 1995 Srebrenica massacre of some 8 000 Muslim men and boys and the siege of Sarajevo that claimed some 10 000 lives.
Also at large is Croatian Serb ex-rebel leader Goran Hadzic.
But the most wanted fugitive today is undoubtedly al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden. Although other key members of al-Qaeda have been apprehended, Bin Laden remains on the loose despite a US reward offer of up to $27m for information leading to his capture.
- AFP
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