FACTBOX: Radovan Karadzic to face trial

(Reuters) - The war crimes trial of former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic will start on October 26.

Karadzic faces 11 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity related to the 1992-1995 Bosnian war that killed 100,000 people, including two counts of genocide.

Here are some facts about Karadzic:

* Karadzic was born on June 19, 1945 in a hamlet in the mountains of Montenegro and raised in poverty by parents who despised the communist rule of Yugoslav President Josip Broz Tito. His father was a Serb nationalist fighter wounded by Tito's partisans at the close of World War Two.

* He became a professional psychiatrist specializing in neurosis and depression and an amateur poet whose works had a fantastical, morbid tinge.

* On the eve of war in 1992, Karadzic warned against plans to declare Bosnia a sovereign state, saying it would perhaps "make the Muslim people disappear, because the Muslims cannot defend themselves if there is war."

* He was indicted by the United Nations war crimes tribunal in The Hague in July 1995 for authorizing the shooting of civilians during the siege of Sarajevo. He was indicted for genocide a second time four months later for orchestrating the slaughter of 8,000 Muslim men after forces led by Bosnian Serb general Ratko Mladic, who is also a fugitive of the tribunal, seized the U.N. "safe area" of Srebrenica in eastern Bosnia.

* Serbia announced on July 21, 2008 that Karadzic had been arrested. Serbian officials said he had been living for several years under an assumed name in Belgrade, posing as an alternative healer, and showed photographs of him unrecognizable behind long hair, thick glasses and a beard. He had been on the run since 1997, two years after NATO intervention ended the war, when he lost power and went underground.

* Karadzic made his first appearance at the ICTY on July 31 and said he had been kidnapped and feared for his life. He said he wanted to handle his own defense rather than use a lawyer.

* Last month prosecutors trying Karadzic for war crimes scaled back the scope of their case, cutting back on the time needed to present arguments. The prosecution, in its filings, reduced the number of municipalities where incidents related to the indictment took place, but kept nearly intact its planned testimony on the 43-month siege of Sarajevo and the 1995 massacre of 8,000 Muslims at Srebrenica, the worst atrocity in Europe since World War Two.

* Karadzic has been held in a detention facility in the Hague for a year as both sides prepare for trial.