Family reaction:Radovan Karadzic and his family are "optimistic" that he can beat the war crimes charges he faces, his brother is reported as saying yesterday.
"Thank God, my brother is alive and healthy. He has lost a lot of weight but he is normal and reasonable," Luka Karadzic was quoted as saying by news agency Beta.
"I can say that he is bursting with optimism. He knows whether or not he is guilty," the brother said after meeting him in a Belgrade detention facility.
Karadzic "does not recognise the tribunal and does not trust in it, but what can we do?" said Luka, who added he had not been in contact with his elder brother for a long time.
"He used another name, he was working with some people who did not know who he was . . . He earned a living from that work," he added. Luka said that Karadzic's wife and daughter were "happy that he is alive".
His wife, Ljiljana Zelen-Karadzic, who lives in Bosnia, has appealed several times for Karadzic to give himself up in order to ease the pressure on his family after a series of raids on their homes by foreign peacekeepers.
She asked to have the restrictions lifted so they can visit him.
Daughter Sonja Karadzic said family members want to spend at least a few hours with Karadzic, now jailed in Belgrade, before his transfer to UN custody.
Bosnian police had seized family members' passports in January over suspicions that they were helping to hide Karadzic. But his daughter said that the family expects Bosnian authorities to lift the restrictions.
In a telephone interview, Sonja Karadzic said that the judge in Belgrade had no objection to a family visit.
International authorities who imposed the travel ban on family members should allow them to go, she said.
- (AP)