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Swedish foreign minister rejects immunity claim by Karadzic
Jul 2, 2009, 19:10 GMT
Stockholm - Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt Thursday rejected claims by former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic that he had received an immunity deal from the United States.
Defence attorneys for Karadzic, who is facing a war crimes trial in The Hague, have said 'via the media' that they wished to meet with Bildt, he said.
Writing in his blog, Bildt said that he was willing to meet with the attorneys, but rejected as 'slightly bizarre' claims that Karadzic had been offered immunity in a secret deal with the United States from prosecution stemming from war crimes atrocities.
The attorneys claim such a deal had been made in 1996 with then US special envoy to the Balkans, Richard Holbrooke.
'With the quite substantial knowledge I have, this is a complete hoax,' said Bildt, a former envoy for the European Union in the Balkans.
A spokeswoman for Bildt told the German Press Agency dpa that no date had been set for a meeting, and that the reports were not new.
Karadzic was arrested in Serbia in July 2008 and is on trial at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague on charges of war crimes relating to the 1992 to 1995 war in Bosnia-Herzegovina after the break-up of Yugoslavia.
Holbrooke, who is now the US envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, has always denied such a deal ever existed.
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