NATO (chief Jaap de Hoop Scheffer vowed the hunt for war crimes fugitive Radovan Karadzic would go on despite Bosnian Serb anger at the botched raid which has left a priest and his son in a coma.
The Serb Orthodox Church in Bosnia denounced Thursday's pre-dawn swoop on the priest's home by 40 British and USA NATO troops as "terrorism" and warned it would cut off international cooperation if those responsible were not brought to justice.
But as Karadzic remained on the run, seven years after being indicted by the UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague (news - web sites) on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity during the 1990s Balkans wars, the alliance's secretary-general was unrepentant.
"I would have preferred of course for this operation to be a success," de Hoop Scheffer told a news conference in Brussels on Friday after welcoming seven ex-communist countries to NATO's ranks.
But he added Karadzic and other fugitives such as former Bosnian Serb commander Ratko Mladic "cannot hide, they cannot run forever".
"Everybody's doing everything he or she can to get them, because I think it's important for the region that they should go where they should be --to the international tribunal at The Hague."
About 2,000 Bosnian Serbs including several senior officials on Thursday protested the raid in which priest Jeremija Starovlah and his 28-year-old son Aleksandar suffered serious head injuries.
And on Friday the Orthodox church in the region threatened to cut off relations with international and local authorities if the NATO-led troops known as SFOR who carried out the operation are not punished.
"The crime of terrorism is ... even more serious as it has been perpetrated by those who present themselves as the main fighters against terrorism," a statement from the Orthodox diocese where the NATO raid took place said, quoted by the SRNA news agency.
The troops used explosives to blast into the priest's home near an Orthodox church in Karadzic's wartime stronghold of Pale, after receiving a credible tip-off that former Bosnian Serb political leader was hiding in the priest's house.
It was the alliance's third unsuccessful attempt to catch Karadzic, who last time evaded capture by just a couple of hours.
The priest and his son were evacuated following the raid to the Tuzla hospital where a doctor said on Friday that they remained on life-support machines.
"They remain in a coma. They are still on life-support machines," he said, asking not to be named.
Karadzic has evaded capture since 1995 despite a five-million-dollar (3.9-million-euro) reward offered by the US State Department for information leading to his arrest.
The charges relate in particular to the 1992-1995 siege of Sarajevo, in which some 10,000 civilians died, and the 1995 massacre of more than 7,000 Muslim men and boys in the eastern Bosnian town of Srebrenica.
The UN court's chief prosecutor Carla Del Ponte has repeatedly accused the Bosnian Serb authorities, the military and some members of the Serb Orthodox church of helping Karadzic evade arrest.
The government of Republika Srpska (RS) -- the Serbian entity which together with the Muslim-Croat Federation makes up post-war Bosnia -- said it expected SFOR to "conduct an investigation into the incident in Pale and the behaviour of its soldiers and to judge their responsibility in the injury of innocent civilians."
SFOR voiced regret Thursday over the civilian casualties, but vowed not to stop its hunt for Karadzic.
Bosnia's top international representative, Paddy Ashdown, echoed the view, recalling that Bosnian Serbs have yet to arrest a single war crimes suspect.