'Butcher of Bosnia' Ratko Mladic convicted of genocide dies

Ratko Mladic, the former Bosnian Serb general convicted of genocide, has died.

Mladic, known as the "Butcher of Bosnia", was serving a life sentence for his role in the country's 1992-95 war.

Local media in Bosnia reported on Thursday that the 84-year-old had died in a United Nations prison hospital in The Hague, the Netherlands. A UN official then confirmed his death to Reuters news agency.

The ruthless ex-military chief was one of the most notorious figures of the conflict, which left more than 100,000 people dead and over one million homeless.

Mladic commanded the Bosnian Serb troops and took control of large swathes of the country, laying siege to the capital Sarajevo and killing civilians with snipers, while also establishing concentration camps for non-Serb civilians, enemy soldiers and prisoners.

In 1995, his troops slaughtered more than 8,000 Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica, in Europe's worst atrocity since the Second World War.

The dead were bulldozed into mass graves, with some bodies later dug up and moved to remote mountains in an attempt to hide evidence of the killings.

Mladic had been in a United Nations detention centre since his arrest near Belgrade in 2011 after many years on the run.

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In 2017, a UN tribunal convicted him of charges including crimes against humanity, extermination, murder and war crimes after orchestrating massacres and ethnic cleansing in Bosnian towns.

When the court sentenced him to life in prison, Mladic shouted: "This is all lies, you are all liars."

The judge said: "The crimes committed rank among the most heinous known to mankind, and include genocide and extermination as a crime against humanity."

UN high commissioner for human rights Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein said Mladic was the "epitome of evil" and hailed the conviction as a "momentous victory for justice".

He had been in ill health in the last few years and was hospitalised repeatedly.

(c) Sky News 2026: 'Butcher of Bosnia' Ratko Mladic convicted of genocide dies