Ratko Mladic, the "Butcher of Srebrenica," is dead. He was serving a life sentence in The Hague.

General Ratko Mladić, the Bosnian Serb commander sentenced to life imprisonment in The Hague for genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity, has died. Serbian media confirmed the news.

Mladić died in a prison hospital in The Hague at the age of 83, said Lidija Pavićević, Undersecretary of State at the Ministry of Human Rights and Minorities of Serbia, saying she received the information from the former commander's son, Darko Mladić, as quoted by Tanjug.

Sentenced to life imprisonment in 2017, and then appealed in 2021, Mladić had been detained in a psychiatric hospital in The Hague since 2024, where he had been bedridden for a year and a half.

In recent months, Serbia had requested his humanitarian release on health grounds, as he was terminally ill and had suffered one or two strokes, but the Hague-based Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals rejected the requests, stating that he was receiving necessary palliative care in prison.

As a military leader with command responsibility, Mladić was among those responsible for the siege of Sarajevo that lasted from 1992 to 1996 and the massacre in Srebrenica in July 1995, an enclave then declared a “safe area” by the United Nations where over 8,000 Bosnian Muslims were systematically killed on Mladić 's orders.

(Unioneonline)