"They remain in a coma. They are still on life-supporting machines," a doctor at the hospital in the northern town of Tuzla where the two were being treated told AFP. He declined to be named.

NATO troops carried out a pre-dawn swoop on the priest's home on Thursday. It was the alliance's third unsuccessful attempt to capture Karadzic, who has been indicted for war crimes by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.

Jeremija Starovlah and his 28-year-old son Aleksandar suffered serious injuries to the head when some 40 US and British troops used explosives to blast a way into their home near an Orthodox church in Karadzic's wartime stronghold of Pale.

The raid came after NATO-led peacekeepers (SFOR) received credible intelligence that Karadzic was hiding in the priest's house.

The priest and his son were evacuated following the raid to the Tuzla hospital.

Meanwhile, the Serb Orthodox Church in Bosnia qualified the operation as "terrorism".

"The crime of terrorism is... even more serious as it has been perpetrated by those who present themselves as the main fighters against terrorism," the SRNA news agency reported, quoting a statement by the Dabrobosanska eparchy, an Orthodox diocese, where the NATO raid took place.

The church also threatend to cut off relations with international and local authorities if they do not punish the SFOR troops who carried out the operation.

Thursday's botched raid sparked protests by some 2,000 angry Bosnian Serbs, including senior government officials, who gathered in the courtyard of an Orthodox church in Pale chanting "fascists".

Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb wartime leader, has evaded capture since being indicted by the UN tribunal in The Hague on charges of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity, despite a five-million-dollar (3.9-million-euro) reward offered by the US State Department for information leading to his arrest.

The charges against Karadzic relate in particular to the 1992-1995 siege of Sarajevo, which killed some 10,000 civilians, 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 postwar 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.

"I expect all those reacting to these events to reflect on that fact," he said.

WAR.WIRE