Clean-shaven and with a hint of a return of his bouffant hairdo, Radovan Karadzic, the former Bosnian Serb leader, appeared before a United Nations war crimes tribunal yesterday and claimed he was 13 years late because the US had told him to withdraw from public life under pain of death.

Despite the bizarre claim, Mr Karadzic struck a res-pectful tone in his first public appearance since his extradition to The Hague this week. He stands accused of genocide for his role in the 43-month siege of Sarajevo and the massacre of 8,000 Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica during the 1992-95 Bosnian war.