The former Bosnian Serb warlord, Radovan Karadzic, in a four-page statement which he was prevented from reading to the war crimes tribunal in The Hague yesterday, states that the high-ranking officials in the 1990s US administration of Bill Clinton want him dead. He says that it will be impossible for him to receive a fair trial after 12 years on the run ended with his arrest last week.

“No one on earth believes in the possibility of an acquittal,” Karadzic says in the statement. “Others from President Clinton’s team … are in a hurry to see me dead,” he says.

Karadzic states that Richard Holbrooke, the US envoy who engineered the peace settlement at Dayton in Ohio, made him an offer, several months after the Bosnian war ended in November 1995. “The offer was as follows: I must withdraw not only from public but also from party offices and completely disappear from the public arena.”

Karadzic says he retired from politics a year later and vanished until he was arrested on a bus in Belgrade in Serbia last week disguised as a long-haired alternative medicine aficionado.

“Holbrooke undertook on behalf of the USA that I would not be tried before this tribunal,” Karadzic’s statement states. He says that Madeleine Albright, Clinton’s secretary of state, told Biljana Plavsic, Karadazic’s successor as Bosnian Serb leader - who is serving an 11-year sentence for war crimes after plea-bargaining and confessing her guilt - that Karadzic should go away to “Russia, Greece or Serbia”.

Karadzic claims that the Hague tribunal has defied US pressure to drop the case against him; it has made Holbrooke to “switch to Plan B - the liquidation of Radovan Karadzic”.

“Mr Holbrooke’s wish for my disappearance … is today still fresher and stronger and the actions aimed at bringing this about are tireless,” Karadzic claims.