Mladić died in U.N. custody in The Hague while serving a life sentence for genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes committed during Bosnia’s 1992-95 war.

Ratko Mladić, the former Bosnian Serb military commander convicted of genocide and other crimes during the Bosnian war, has died at 84 while in U.N. custody in The Hague.

Mladić was serving a life sentence imposed over his role in atrocities committed during the 1992-95 conflict in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The U.N. tribunal found him responsible for genocide connected to the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, in which more than 8,000 Bosniak Muslim men and boys were killed, as well as crimes tied to the siege of Sarajevo and the persecution, deportation and forcible transfer of non-Serb civilians.

A trial chamber sentenced Mladić to life in prison in 2017. In 2021, an appeals chamber upheld his convictions for genocide, crimes against humanity and violations of the laws or customs of war, along with the life sentence.

His death prompted sharply different political and personal reactions. Emir Suljagić, who leads the Srebrenica Memorial, said Mladić’s death did not change the need to preserve the record of the crimes or the responsibility for them. Milorad Dodik, the Bosnian Serb political leader, described the death as a killing and said Mladić had defended Serbs.

Those reactions do not alter the court rulings. Mladić’s case remains one of the central prosecutions arising from the Balkan wars and the worst mass killing in Europe since World War II.