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Once proud Ratko Mladic ended up in near-poverty, shielded by a cousin and by villagers who still refuse to condemn him
Ratko Mladic's 59-year-old second cousin Branislav – known to all as "Branko" – is wiry and deeply tanned. He emerges through the rusty gates of his home in the northern Serbian village of Lazarevo pushing a trailer, his face furious beneath a dirty pale blue cap pulled over his eyes.
It was in Branko's house that Europe's most wanted war criminal was found by Serbian special police at 5am on Thursday.
Branko, a former television repairman who now ekes out a living by farming, leaves the house accompanied by two other men. One, a heavy-set man in middle age, is pointed out to the Guardian as "Jotosovic", who was in the house with Branko when the Serbian special police came for Ratko Mladic and was asked to help dress him.
On the road outside, the men hook up the trailer to a tractor before leaving without a word. The open gates offer a glimpse of the place in which the man wanted for the massacre at Srebrenica, where 8,000 Muslim men and boys were killed, and the siege of Sarajevo, where 10,000 perished, lived his last days on the run.
Two buildings are visible behind the men, their walls painted a dirty yellow. In one of them lives Branko. In the other, where Branko's late parents once lived, Mladic was found.
Police officials said that they had learned that Mladic had moved into the largely Bosnian Serb village about two years ago, figuring he could be safe with his relatives there.
Mladic was about to venture into the grassy yard for some fresh air, the officials told Associated Press, when four men in masks and black fatigues without insignia jumped over the fence and burst into the house, grabbing the frail-looking man and forcing him to the floor, face down.
"Identify yourself," shouted one of the policemen. Mladic's reply was a whisper. "I'm the one you're looking for," he said, before asking them not to "do something funny". The officers demanded the two guns Mladic was carrying, then the former Serbian general was pushed into a four-wheel drive, which drove full speed out of the village towards Belgrade with dust flying.
"Even though Mladic had two pistols on his person, there was no resistance and he talked with members of the security information agency and other officials in a completely normal and natural manner," Rasim Ljajic, president of the National Council for Co-operation with The Hague Tribunal, told Serbian TV. According to his lawyer, Milos Salic, Mladic said he did not use the guns because those arresting him "were children".
Serbian media had further details. A neighbour who had been called into the house described how Mladic was living in a dark, untidy room provided with ample food, still visible after his arrest, including pizza that he had not apparently had the opportunity to eat.
Even though he lived under the pseudonym "Milorad Komodic", Mladic's ID card, which had expired in 1999, confirmed who he was – the former military commander of the Bosnian Serbs and a man who once said he would rather shoot himself than be taken.
After all the stories of how he used to live openly in Belgrade before the fall of Slobodan Milosevic – almost as a celebrity, going to football matches and restaurants – the last days of Mladic's freedom were spent in very different circumstances.
According to those who raided the house, he was found in conditions close to poverty, frail but coherent with slurred speech from two strokes he is believed to have suffered, one of which left the fingers of one hand immobile.
Even in the heat of the early Serbian summer, Mladic was dressed in layers of clothing to keep him warm. He asked, as he was taken to the headquarters of the BIA, the Serbian intelligence agency, to have a suit sent for him to wear in court. In the end he wore a baseball cap and jacket.
So what is this place, Lazarevo, where Mladic was found? Neighbours said that many living there had relocated to the village after the second world war and regarded their roots as being Bosnian Serb. Now Mladic has gone, those who lived around him are left supplying contradictory stories.
The villagers who will speak to the media appear to have considerable affection for the former fugitive. Some say at first they had no idea that Mladic was living among them. Then they start to tell stories of encounters with him.
One resident says Mladic came to the village during the Bosnian war. Another that he kept bees in the village. A third recalls greeting him in the street and being asked for a drink.
"I never saw him," says Nedleko Arsic, 57, sitting on his bicycle in the shade of the cherry and plum trees outside the house. "But if anyone had seen him here they would have hidden him.
"We'll find out who tipped off the police," he says with a hint of menace. "No one can keep that inside of him. It will all come out."
Arsic is one of those who wants to put up a plaque on Branko's house saying "Ratko Mladic was captured here." Someone has already put a sticker on the road sign at the entrance of the village celebrating it as Mladic's last home before he was found. Some in the village say they would like to name the village after him.
Another neighbour, who does not want to be named, says: "He used to pass by sometimes and say hello. Once I saw a black four-by-four with someone in the back talking on a phone. Someone later said that it was him."
No one criticises Mladic. The angriest say that he was fighting for justice for Serbs during the war; the more "lukewarm" only that he is innocent until proven guilty.
Mladic is suspected of hiding in other parts of Serbia over the years, perhaps moving from safe house to safe house as his former aides and associates in the network that once protected him were gradually rounded up.
All the time – as became clear after his arrest – he followed his own pursuit on television and radio, becoming familiar with the faces of those tasked with finding him.
According to a spokeswoman for the special court, since his capture he has been keen to speak to people involved in the hunt for him.
One of his hideouts is believed to have been in New Belgrade, close to the Chinese market, a place of tall, ugly blocks. Here in apartment 20 at 118 Juri Gagarina Street, a former bodyguard of Mladic, Jovan Djago, testified in court that he had rented the former general a flat between 2003 and 2006, a few minutes' walk from where Radovan Karadzic, Mladic's political boss, was also hiding.
What seems clear now is that his life on the run had become ever more difficult as the government sought more aggressively to be accepted as a candidate for EU membership.
His pension was cancelled, finally, in 2004, and his security detail was wound up. Where once he was allegedly able to visit army offices or even stay in barracks, those hiding holes were blocked, even military facilities searched.
There were raids on his son Darko's Belgrade house, as well as his wife's home and a weekend retreat owned by the family in Divcibare. He was sought in Han Pijesak, in the villages on Zlatibor mountain, in Pancevo and Valjevo, even in Montenegro – and all the while with the suspicion that there were those in the Serbian government who knew precisely where he was.
In the end, only a month before the EU was due to make an initial examination of Serbia's bid for membership, Serbia's president, Boris Tadic – who took personal control of the operation to arrest Mladic – finally laid his hands on him, removing the last serious obstacle.
On Friday some of the old arrogance, familiar from the Bosnian war, appeared to be returning.
At the ending of a closed court hearing to approve his extradition, Belgrade Radio B92 reported that Mladic, who had goaded the prosecutor after his arrest, apologised for his behaviour, and then requested strawberries and a television to be provided in his cell.