Overview
- His death was reported by Serbian state media and confirmed to Reuters by a U.N. official after he died in a U.N. detention hospital in The Hague on Thursday.
- Mladic was serving a life sentence for genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity following a marathon trial that produced hundreds of witnesses and thousands of exhibits.
- The Hague tribunals found he ordered the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, in which about 8,000 Bosniak men and boys were killed, and that he helped direct the siege of Sarajevo.
- He evaded capture for nearly 16 years before being arrested in Serbia on May 26, 2011, and his convictions and life sentence were upheld on appeal while recent requests for compassionate release were repeatedly denied.
- Survivors and human rights advocates say his death closes a long legal chapter but does not erase mass graves or trauma, and the news is likely to deepen political and memory divisions in Bosnia and Serbia.