Aleksandar Vucic announces that Ratko Mladic’s body will be transported to Serbia, while authorities prepare for a funeral attended by tens of thousands of participants

The lifeless body of Ratko Mladic, the former military leader of the Bosnian Serbs, will be transported on Thursday from The Hague to Serbia, where he is to be buried, President Aleksandar Vucic announced. Mladic died last week at the age of 84 while serving his life sentence in a United Nations detention facility.

Vucic said that the body had been collected and was expected to arrive in Serbia late in the afternoon. The funeral could take place in Belgrade, but the date has not been officially set. The Serbian president said that the authorities were preparing for a difficult operation, as intelligence services estimate that tens of thousands of people could attend.

Ratko Mladic was convicted in 2017 by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia of genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. The sentence was upheld on appeal in 2021. He was found responsible for the Srebrenica massacre in July 1995, when approximately 8,000 Bosnian men and boys were killed.

Seriously ill, Mladic died on August 27, a few days after his request to be transferred to a military hospital in Belgrade was denied. The Bosnian War, fought between 1992 and 1995, resulted in approximately 100,000 deaths and 2.2 million displaced people.

Read also Ratko Mladić, former military commander of the Bosnian Serbs, died in custody in The Hague, where he was serving a life sentence for genocide and war crimes