By Mark Rice-Oxley

Some thought he was hidden in the mountains and monasteries of south-east Bosnia. Others thought he lurked behind a detail of dedicated bodyguards.

Last week, a somewhat more prosaic truth emerged: Radovan Karadzic, the intellectual architect of the Bosnian horror, had come up with a simpler, more ingenious way of avoiding detection as Europe's most wanted fugitive: a new persona, an inscrutable disguise and a new life hidden in plain view.

When Karadzic, 63, was finally tracked down last week, after 12 years on the run, those who knew him marvelled at the transformation. Gone were the trademark bouffant quiff, dimpled chin and jowly features that made him one of the most recognisable faces in Europe for all the wrong reasons.

Instead, the same deep-set eyes now looked out of an old man's face, deeply bearded and wildly hirsute, a cross between an Orthodox monk and a slightly sinister Santa Claus. Unsurprisingly, the first thing he asked for was a haircut and a shave.

But few were surprised at his new incarnation: Karadzic had spent the past few years as an alternative health guru peddling holistic cures in an anonymous corner of the Serbian capital. This, after all, was an eccentric, theatrical intellectual with a background in medicine and a penchant for mysticism.

The qualities that made him so dangerous as a demagogue who encouraged Serbs to resist Bosnian secession from Yugoslavia and commit fratricide against their Muslim and Croat compatriots also served him well as Dragan David Dabic, small-time purveyor of new age remedies.

'The fact that he has been practising alternative medicine is no shock - his pretensions and self-delusions know no bounds, whether he was talking to us about the tribulations and sacrifices of Serbs down the centuries, or tending to the ailments of his patients,' said journalist Ed Vulliamy, who wrote a book on the 1992-1995 Bosnian war.

Mr Martin Bell, a former British Member of Parliament who also covered the war as a reporter and met Karadzic on numerous occasions, said that if he had been sitting next to him on the Belgrade bus on which he was arrested 'I wouldn't have known who he was'.

'But he was a quasi-medical man in the first place, so I'm not surprised he was doing what he was doing,' he added.

Karadzic's fall was as abrupt and startling as his rise. He was born in rural Montenegro in 1945 with World War II still fresh in the memory of a part of Europe decimated and fractured by the conflict.

His father had fought the Nazis as a Serb nationalist chetnik, and Karadzic too would be lured by the intoxicating whiff of nationalism once he had escaped rural Montenegro for Sarajevo.

But the country boy was never fully accepted by the metropolitan elite, despite a degree in medicine and short stints abroad in Denmark and the United States.

He had a wife and three children and a psychiatric practice in the mountain town of Pale, south-east of Sarajevo, but Karadzic craved more: an audience and status.

It was during a short jail sentence for a fraudulent property scam (Karadzic was an eager gambler and bon vivant) that he developed his nationalist credo, seduced as so many Slavic nationalists are by atavistic yearnings for a simple coherent popular narrative.

'He was the intellectual in charge,' said Mr Bell. 'He was a chaotic individual. You could never meet him before midday, but late at night over a bottle of scotch he would expand on the history and in particular, the maps. He always complained, with the divisions of maps, that Serbs were left with rocks and rattlesnakes.'

Karadzic would digress into sophistry or else begin reciting his sentimental poetry. 'He was the most difficult politician to reason with that I have ever met,' said Mr Bell.

As Yugoslavia began to unravel under the pull of opposing nationalist movements, he helped found the Serbian Democratic Party, a movement that turned 'ethnic cleansing' into a political philosophy aimed at providing Bosnia's 1.3million Serbs with a racially pure homeland adjoining Serbia.

When the Muslim-Croat government declared independence from Belgrade, Karadzic mobilised the Serb minority, with help from the Serbian army across the border, retreated from cosmopolitan Sarajevo and held the city under siege for more than three years.

Thousands died in the shelling. A further 8,000 were killed when a UN-designated safe haven at Srebrenica was overrun by Karadzic's Serb forces in July 1995.

'He was the worst of the worst,' said Mr Richard Holbrooke, the chief US negotiator who managed to bring Karadzic to the table in 1995 at Dayton for a peace deal that ended a war which killed some 250,000 people and displaced around two million.

'He's got blood all over his hands. He and (former military chief Ratko) Mladic are right up there with Osama bin Laden.'

And yet Karadzic was far more open to the diplomatic gamesmanship than an absolutist like Osama bin Laden. Indeed he played the game shrewdly, meeting diligently with would-be peacemakers throughout the conflict, only to renege on promises, truces and ceasefires.

Supporters might claim that he never had real control over commanders on the ground - relations with Mladic were particularly tense - and that Bosnia would have disintegrated bloodily anyway, with or without Karadzic.

But those who negotiated with him were in no doubt as to who was in charge. Former US secretary of state Madeleine Albright called him 'the brains behind the operation'. Mr Paddy Ashdown, for four years the top international administrator in post-war Bosnia, said he was 'accused of being the architect of the worst war crimes that have been perpetrated in Europe since the Nazis'.

In all, Karadzic faces 11 counts of war crimes, including genocide.

Once the indictment was issued, Karadzic reverted to obscurity, elusive to the Nato troops tasked with bringing him to justice. An appeal by his wife three years ago to give himself up suggested he had since left his Pale fiefdom behind him.

His secret new life was a burlesque counterpoint to the old: there was a mistress; a website peddling 'human quantum energy' and strange bullet-shaped objects with supposed healing properties; a column in an alternative medicine magazine; and occasional visits to a nationalist bar in which Karadzic-the-healer would sip wine undetected beneath portraits of Karadzic-the-warlord.

Two sides of the same bewildering personality. 'The person I got to know was a person that everybody would like to be their friend,' said Mr Goran Kojic, a Belgrade editor who published the work of Karadzic/Dabic.

'He was a highly cultured man, he was very tolerant, he had a sense of humour, he was very positive, he was very intellectual.'

mark.riceoxley@btinternet.com

The writer reported from Bosnia during the 1990s.