Ratko Mladic died Thursday August 27 at a United Nations prison hospital in The Hague, Netherlands, while serving a life sentence for genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. He was 84.
The International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals confirmed his death and announced that judge Graciela Gatti Santana had ordered a full inquiry into the circumstances.
He died of natural causes after years of deteriorating health, he had suffered multiple strokes and was hospitalized on several occasions during his years in custody.
Mladic was the commander of Bosnian Serb forces during the 1992-1995 war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, a war that claimed approximately 100,000 lives.
Under his command, Serb forces laid siege to Sarajevo for 44 months, killing civilians with snipers and shells in the longest siege of a capital city in the history of modern warfare.
In July 1995, his forces captured the UN-designated "safe area" of Srebrenica and systematically executed more than 8,000 Muslim men and boys, the only act of genocide recognized in Europe since the Holocaust.
He evaded capture for 16 years after his 1995 indictment, hiding in Serbia, before Serbian war crimes investigators arrested him in 2011.
The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia convicted him in 2017. His appeals were rejected in 2021. He died in prison.
The Srebrenica massacre remains legally the only post-World War II genocide in Europe. Its survivors are still locating and identifying remains.