A UN tribunal has sentenced former Bosnian Serb commander Ratko Mladic to life imprisonment after convicting him of war crimes and crimes against humanity, including genocide, during Bosnia's 1992-95 war.
The court in The Hague on November 22 convicted Mladic on 10 of the 11 counts he faced.
UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra'ad al-Hussein hailed the verdict as a "momentous victory for justice," calling Mladic the "epitome of evil."
Mladic was found guilty of commanding forces responsible for crimes including the worst atrocities of the war — the deadly three-year siege of the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo, and the 1995 massacre of some 8,000 Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica.
Presiding Judge Alphons Orie read out the judgment after ordering Mladic out of the courtroom over an outburst.
"They are lying, you are lying. I don't feel good," Mladic shouted, before being hustled out of the courtroom by two UN security guards.
Barring appeals, Mladic's verdict will be the last to come down from the tribunal, which was established at The Hague in 1993 to prosecute crimes committed in the Balkan wars of the early 1990s.
Mladic, 75, called the "Butcher of Bosnia" by his enemies, was accused of genocide for organizing the summary execution of some 8,000 Muslim Bosniak men and boys in the eastern enclave of Srebrenica in July 1995, which has been called the worst atrocity to be committed in Europe since the Holocaust.
Given the gravity of the alleged offenses, Mladic's case became one of the highest-profile war crimes trials since the Nuremberg trials of Germany's Nazi leadership after World War II.
Prosecutors say Mladic's soldiers pushed past Dutch UN peacekeepers before separating the males for execution and putting the elderly, women, and children on buses and trucks to Bosniak-controlled territory.
The men and boys were marched away, shot in the back, and dumped in mass graves. The remains of about 6,900 of the victims have been identified through DNA analysis, but many are considered still missing decades later.
In 2007, the tribunal ruled the massacre was genocide carried out by Bosnian Serb forces.
Prosecutors said the ultimate plan pursued by Mladic, Bosnian Serb political leader Radovan Karadzic, and Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic was to purge Bosnia of non-Serbs -- in what became known as "ethnic cleansing" -- and carve out a "Greater Serbia" in what had been Yugoslavia.
Other counts against Mladic include persecutions, murder, torture, rape, extermination, the shelling and sniping of Sarajevo, deportations, terrorism, and taking UN peacekeepers hostage.
The tribunal filed charges against Mladic in 1995, but he remained in hiding in Serbia until Belgrade arrested him and handed him over in May 2011.
A survivor of multiple strokes, Mladic was visibly frail when the trial began in 2012. His defense attorneys raised his health as an issue throughout the trial.
The tribunal in 2016 found Mladic's political chief, Karadzic, guilty of similar charges, including genocide, and sentenced him to 40 years in prison. He has appealed.
Milosevic died in his cell in The Hague in 2006, and his trial ended without a verdict.
