Former Bosnian Serb military leader and war criminal Ratko Mladic has died in a prison hospital in the Hague, Serbian state broadcaster RTS reported.
The 84-year-old's death follows several strokes in recent years. At the height of the civil war following the collapse of Yugoslavia he was dubbed the Butcher of Bosnia for his role in the 1995 Srebrenica massacre.
Mr Mladic was indicted on 11 counts of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity for his role in the Balkan country's 1992-95 war that killed 100,000 people and left 2.2 million homeless. He was convicted in 2016 and was sentenced to life in prison in 2017.
Prosecutors presented evidence of “the hand of General Mladic” in crimes throughout the conflict. “Ratko Mladic assumed the mantle of the criminal goal of ethnically cleansing Bosnia,” prosecutor Dermot Groome told the judges at the Yugoslav war crimes court in The Hague in 2012.
Mladic pleaded not guilty to the charges and was contemptuous of the proceedings in the courtroom where he sarcastically applauded judges as they walked on to the bench.
Prosecutors held him responsible for the 44-month siege of Sarajevo where his forces waged a “terror campaign” of sniping and shelling that left an estimated 10,000 people, the vast majority of them civilians, dead.
In the Srebrenica massacre 8,000 Muslim men and boys were systematically murdered as Mladic's command overran the town while Dutch UN peacekeepers helplessly looked on.
More than 100,000 people died in the conflict, mostly Bosniac Muslims, and the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo, was besieged for three years. It has also been estimated that under the command of the Mladic, soldiers raped up to 15,000 women, most of them Muslim.
It was in pursuit of a “Greater Serbia” that General Mladic allegedly ordered his troops to “cleanse” Bosnian towns, driving out Croats, Muslims and other non-Serb residents.
After the war, General Mladic continued his military career but went into hiding in 2000 after the government of then Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic fell.
He was on the run until May 2011 when he was arrested at a relative's house in Lazarevo, north-eastern Serbia and flown to a prison in The Hague a few days later.
In his heyday Mladic was a blustery commander in military fatigues and was keen to stress the point in his first court appearance, opening proceedings by saying: “I am general Ratko Mladic … I defended my country and my people.”
