As he made his first appearance before the international U.N. crimes tribunal at The Hague, Bosnian Serb suspected war criminal Radovan Karadzic denounced the "media witch-hunt" that will eventually end with him not receiving a fair trial.

Mr. Karadzic, held responsible for the most infamous carnage since WW II (the Srebrenica massacre in which 8000 Muslims were slaughtered), said the media already labeled him as a war criminal and this fact makes an eventual acquittal "unimaginable", as he put it.

The 63-year-old formed political leader also told judges that he made an immunity deal with the United States, a fact firmly denied by Richard Holbrooke, negotiator of the accord that ended the Bosnian war.

"There was never any deal," Holbrooke told BBC.

The deal mentioned by Karadzic meant that the Bosnian Serb leader and Holbrooke, the former US ambassador to the United Nations, reached and agreement according to which Karadzic would withdraw from the public life while the CIA would stay off his back.

It seems, however, highly improbable that such a deal wasn’t made, considering the fact that Mr. Karadzic has been “hiding” right in Serbia’s capital city, Belgrade, for almost 13 years and was caught by Serbian secret agents right at a time when Serbia intends to start negotiating the adherence to the European Union. The EU’s told Serbian officials that the first and foremost condition of adherence was the capture and trial of Mr. Karadzic.

Mr. Karadzic said the deal was made in 1996, but, although he kept his side of the deal, later, there were attempts to "liquidate me".

"It is clear that, unable to fulfill the commitments he had undertaken on behalf of the USA, he (Holbrooke) switched to Plan B - the liquidation of Radovan Karadzic," he said.

Karadzic submitted a document to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in which he said that his arrest had several irregularities. The most important of them is the media witch-hunt which began in the Muslim media even before the beginning of the armed conflict, he said.

"I believe that this fact seriously jeopardizes the trial itself."

Mr. Karadzic also said that he decided to represent and defend himself during this trial. However, hid didn’t entered a plea yet. The court gave him 30 days to do so, and the tribunal judge adjourned the hearing until 29 August.