A United Nations tribunal on Wednesday sentenced to life Ratko Mladic, the former Bosnian Serb commander, for genocide and other war crimes during the Bosnian War.
Mladic, known as the “Butcher of Bosnia”, led his forces during the massacre of over 8,000 Muslims over four days in the town of Srebrenica in 1995. Former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan had called the Srebrenica massacre the “worst on European soil since World War II”.
The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia convicted Mladic on 10 of the 11 charges he faced. The 74-year-old was removed from the UN court in The Hague after he started shouting at the judges before the verdict was read out. The judges rejected a request by Mladic’s lawyer to halt proceedings because of his high blood pressure.
Judge Alphons Orie ruled that Mladic carried out and personally oversaw a deadly campaign of sniping and shelling in Sarajevo, Al Jazeera reported. Over 10,000 people died during the siege of the Bosnian capital Sarajevo between 1992 and 1996.
In March 2016, the tribunal sentenced former Bosnian leader Radovan Karadzic to 40 years in prison for his role in the Srebrenica massacre.
The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia is an ad hoc court, formed in 1993, to prosecute those responsible for war crimes during the Yugoslav Wars. Mladic’s case was the court’s last case.
Mladic had been on the run since 1995 and had spent years in hiding before he was caught in rural northern Serbia in 2011.
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