This article is from the archive of our partner .
When Serbian police arrested former Bosnian Serb army chief Ratko Mladic this morning, they ended a 16-year manhunt for the man held responsible for committing atrocities during the Balkan wars of the early 1990s. Where did they finally find him? At a relative's home in the tiny Serbian village of Lazarevo (pictured above), about 60 miles northeast of the Serbian capital, Belgrade.
Here's how it happened. After years of failed Mladic raids--according to this helpful New York Times graphic, peacekeepers once burst into Mladic's mother's house only hours after she died in the hopes of capturing her son by the death bed--Serbian authorities learned that there was a man living in Lazarevo named Milorad Komadic (an anagram for Ratko Mladic) who resembled Mladic and had identification papers with that name, according to The Times. Then before sunrise today, after two weeks of surveillance, Serbian intelligence agents stealthily stormed a single-story yellow brick house in the village owned by a relative of Mladic's mother, finding an old, bald, and physically diminished Mladic with two pistols. Mladic didn't resist arrest and "was pale, which could mean he rarely ventured out of the house--a probable reason why he went unnoticed," a Serbian government minister tells the AP.