Bosnian Serb war criminal Radovan Karadžić will serve the rest of his life sentence for genocide in UK prison, the British government revealed on Wednesday.
Karadžić, 75, was sentenced to 40 years in 2016 for his role in the 1995 Srebrenica massacre and the four-year siege of Sarajevo by Serb forces from 1992 to 1996.
After the war, Karadžić went on the run and was only caught and handed over to a war crimes tribunal at the Hague in 2008. In 2019, his sentence was increased to life.
“Karadžić is one of the few people to have been found guilty of genocide,” said Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab.
“He was responsible for the massacre of men, women and children at the Srebrenica genocide and helped prosecute the siege of Sarajevo with its remorseless attacks on civilians.
We should take pride in the fact that, from UK support to secure his arrest to the prison cell he now faces, Britain has supported the 30-year pursuit of justice for these heinous crimes.”
Karadžić is currently in custody at the Hague and will now be moved to an unnamed British prison.
The conflict in Bosnia was Europe’s bloodiest since World War II, leaving 100,000 dead and millions homeless.
The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague convicted scores of people involved in the Balkan conflicts of the 1990s, with the inmates sent to several European countries to serve their sentences.
