Seized Materials Point to Spying on Bosnia Leader

U.N. investigators Monday pored through “bags and bags” of audiotapes, transcripts and listening devices allegedly used by police loyal to war crimes suspect Radovan Karadzic to spy on the Bosnian Serb president and other anti-Karadzic officials.

The evidence was seized after NATO and the United Nations intervened to stop clashes between rival factions of Bosnian Serb police at the Banja Luka police station, the most volatile incident yet in an increasingly ugly dispute dividing the Bosnian Serb half of this country.

Investigators were also looking for evidence in the beating of a Constitutional Court justice who sided with the Bosnian Serb president, Biljana Plavsic, against Karadzic, a U.N. spokesman said.

Plavsic is locked in a 2-month-old power struggle with Karadzic and his hard-line allies, who are attempting to remove her from office. The West wants to neutralize Karadzic--twice indicted by an international court on genocide and other war crimes charges--but his grip on authority continues to undermine the Bosnian peace process.

The conflict between Plavsic, who now accuses him of unbridled corruption, and the Karadzic faction threatens to rupture the Bosnian Serb leadership and create an unstable, two-headed Republika Srpska, as the ministate is called.

Western officials familiar with the material inventoried at the five-story police station said it appeared to include surreptitiously made tapes of Plavsic’s conversations with her Cabinet and with senior North Atlantic Treaty Organization and international officials, as well as fax communications.

Among the items discovered was “very extensive, sophisticated listening equipment,” a Western official said, and evidence that the police station served as the organizational hub for the intimidation of judges and other human rights violations.

“There is substantial evidence that the president’s phones were tapped [and] her meeting rooms were bugged by the police,” the official said. “They were running an espionage center.”

“There was a general level of surprise at the sophistication and quantity of the surveillance equipment,” another Western official said.

The standoff at the police station began before dawn Sunday when special police loyal to Plavsic raided the building.

*

At a news conference in Banja Luka, the Bosnian Serbs’ largest city and Plavsic’s headquarters, the embattled president Monday said the raid was necessary because she was being bugged. She said more than 250 tapes were found.

Banja Luka was calm Monday afternoon, but numerous police officers from Karadzic’s hard-line stronghold of Pale, about 100 miles to the southeast, were seen cruising the streets. Angry secret police stood near the occupied station and grumbled that Western forces “had no right” to act as they did.

Bosnian Serb television, controlled by the Karadzic wing, blasted the raid as an “illegal break-in” by rogue former cops.

The episode contained a quotient of embarrassment for international officials who support Plavsic: Her police acted illegally when they moved on the police station, and those officials Monday were trying to deflect criticism.

In Sunday’s events, NATO did not respond until 12 hours after a 50-member contingent of Plavsic’s police, armed with proscribed assault rifles, occupied the police station--and only after receiving an urgent plea from Karadzic ally Momcilo Krajisnik, the Bosnian Serb member of Bosnia-Herzegovina’s three-man presidency, who wanted to deploy his own police to recapture the building.

NATO denied Krajisnik’s request but was left in a quandary: The action by Plavsic’s police violated NATO guidelines for special police that were formalized just last week and designed, ironically, to crack down on Karadzic’s police, not Plavsic’s.

International officials scrambled to take advantage of the opportunity created by the actions of Plavsic’s police. As NATO secured the police station Sunday afternoon, the international Office of the High Representative, the main body in charge of executing Bosnia’s peace accords, requested that NATO and the U.N. launch an investigation into human rights abuses.

*

The official focus of the investigation was the alleged intimidation of members of the Bosnian Serb Constitutional Court, which were called on this month to rule on Plavsic’s efforts to dissolve the pro-Karadzic parliament. One of the judges, Jovo Rosic, was badly beaten after it became known--possibly through wiretaps--that he planned to side with Plavsic. The court ruled Friday against Plavsic.

In addition to the tapes, transcripts and electronic wiretapping equipment, U.N. police found a large stash of weapons, including fragmentation and rifle grenades, U.N. officials said.

Times special correspondent Zoran Cirjakovic in Banja Luka contributed to this report.