THE HAGUE: Former Bosnian Serb military commander Ratko Mladic was found guilty of genocide by a UN war crimes tribunal on Wednesday and sentenced to life in prison for orchestrating massacres and ethnic cleansing during Bosnia's war.
More than 20 years after Srebrenica, Ratko Mladic has been found guilty of genocide.
— BBC Breakfast (@BBCBreakfast) November 22, 2017
Here’s a reminder of who he is and what he’s accused of:https://t.co/OIqIWQ3YLu pic.twitter.com/Vsuy0WcRcH
(Video Twitter/@BBCBreakfast)
Mladic, 74, was hustled out of the court minutes before the verdict for screaming "this is all lies, you are all liars" after returning from what his son described as a blood pressure test which delayed the reading-out of the judgment.
The UN Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia found Mladic guilty of 10 of 11 charges, including the slaughter of 8,000 Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica and the siege of the Bosnian capital Sarajevo, in which more than 11,000 civilians were killed by shelling and sniper fire over 43 months.
The killings in Srebrenica of men and boys after they were separated from women and taken away in buses or marched off to be shot amounted to Europe's worst atrocity since World War Two.
A woman writes in a book inside a travelling monument called 'Prijedor 92' outside the Yugoslav War Crimes Tribunal as she waits for the verdict to be handed down in the genocide trial against former Bosnian Serb military chief Ratko Mladic, in The Hague, Netherlands on Wednesday. (Reuters photo)
"The crimes committed rank among the most heinous known to humankind, and include genocide and extermination as a crime against humanity," Presiding Judge Alphons Orie said in reading out a summary of the judgment.
UN human rights chief Zeid Ra'ad al-Hussein said Mladic is the "epitome of evil" and his conviction was a "momentous victory for justice".
“Mladic is the epitome of evil, and the prosecution of Mladic is the epitome of what international justice is all about,” Zeid said in a statement.
“Today’s verdict is a warning to the perpetrators of such crimes that they will not escape justice, no matter how powerful they may be nor how long it may take."
Families of victims of the Bosnian Genocide hear the sentencing of Ratko Mladic pic.twitter.com/NTGc23Qkvm
— Sky News (@SkyNews) November 22, 2017
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