In a written submission to The Hague-based war crimes tribunal published on Friday, Karadzic said the media had already declared him a war criminal, and that it was "unimaginable to many people that this court could now acquit me," a fact that he said, "jeopardizes the trial itself."

Karadzic also asked the court not to set any timeframe for the consideration

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of his case.

"Speed is essential to the calculations of a gunslinger, but not at all in matters of law and justice," he wrote.

Karadzic faces 11 counts of war crimes. The charges include the massacre of 8,000 Bosniak men and boys at Srebrenica in 1995 and the almost four-year siege of Sarajevo, during which some 10,000 people died.

The wartime Bosnian Serb president first appeared before The Hague court on Thursday. Official reports said he was arrested in Belgrade on July 21 after more than a decade on the run.

In the document, Karadzic expanded on his earlier claim that a deal with then-U.S. envoy to the Balkans, Richard Holbrooke, had given him immunity from prosecution by the UN tribunal.

Karadzic said he had agreed to step down as Bosnian Serb president in 1996 and disappear from public life after being promised that charges against him would be dropped. He said he had sought a similar deal for General Ratko Mladic, still wanted by The Hague tribunal on genocide charges.

Announcing Karadzic's resignation shortly before Bosnia's first post-war polls, Holbrooke said in Belgrade that Karadzic would "not appear in public, or on radio or television or other media or participate in any way in the elections."

Holbrooke has repeatedly denied however that he offered Karadzic immunity from prosecution.

Karadzic also claimed that his life was in danger in The Hague, and that Holbrooke was seeking to have him "liquidated." He also complained that he had not been able to contact any of his "new friends" after being seized by Serbian authorities in Belgrade.

"They did not even let me send a single SMS message," he said.

The former Bosnian Serb leader is the most prominent war crimes suspect to appear in The Hague since Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic, who died in jail in 2006 before his trial could be completed.

His arrest came shortly after the election of a pro-European government in Serbia and the appointment of a new security and intelligence agency chief. The arrest of Karadzic was one of the conditions set by the EU for Serbia's membership of the organization.

THE HAGUE, August 1 (RIA Novosti)