Explaining to the presiding judge Alphonse Orie that his attorneys Nicholas Stewart and Chrissa Loucas were good lawyers but were not defending him well, Krajisnik said he had decided to conduct his defence on his own to contest what he called the false testimonies of false prosecution witnesses.
If his request is accepted, the former president of the Bosnian Serb parliament will become the third Hague indictee to conduct his defence on his own, after former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic and Serbian Radical Party leader Vojislav Seselj.
Until a final decision on Krajisnik's request is made, the trial chamber will continue the trial with the existing attorneys but it grant the accused the right to question prosecution witnesses after they are cross-examined by his defence.
Krajisnik also requested additional investigators to help him prepare his defence, who he said should "find Karadzic, Mladic and those hiding in the woods", so that they could state as defence witnesses if he had been a member of the Republika Srpska Presidency.
The former president of Republika Srpska, Radovan Karadzic, and the former commander of the Republika Srpska Army, Ratko Mladic, have been on the run since 1995, when the Hague tribunal indicted them for genocide and crimes against humanity.
Krajisnik was arrested by the Stabilisation Force in Bosnia-Herzegovina in April 2000, and his trial started on 4 February 2004. He was initially indicted along with Biljana Plavsic, a former Republika Srpska president who pleaded guilty to charges of persecution of non-Serbs in Bosnia-Herzegovina and was sentenced in February 2003 to 11 years in prison on the basis of a plea-bargain with the prosecution.