The wife of Europe’s most wanted war crimes fugitive, herself on trial for illegal possession of weapons, said on Tuesday that he has died.
“If he [Ratko Mladic] is alive, he would have found ways to call us,” Bosiljka Mladic told the court during the opening hearing of her weapons possession case.
She said Mladic — the wartime Bosnian Serb army commander — had suffered three strokes while hiding in Belgrade and could not have stayed alive without medical help.
“He needed intensive care,” she said.
Mladic’s family say he has passed away and want Serbian courts to declare him officially dead. Serbian officials, however, say the bid, without any supporting evidence, is aimed at undermining attempts to find him.
Mladic is wanted by a UN war crimes court on genocide charges over the 1995 massacre of 8,000 Muslims — the worst carnage in Europe since World War II — in the eastern Bosnian town of Srebrenica, and other atrocities during Bosnia’s 1992 to 1995 war.
UN prosecutors believe Mladic is hiding in Serbia under the protection of wartime comrades. Serbian authorities claim they are doing everything to locate him — his arrest is a precondition for Serbia’s EU membership bid.
Bosiljka Mladic told the judges that her husband left the Belgrade family home in 2001 when his patron, former Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic, was arrested and extradited to the UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague. Milosevic died in prison in 2006 of a heart attack. Bosiljka Mladic could face prison if convicted over the three guns, a rifle and 60 rounds of ammunition found during a police search of the house in 2008.
She stated in the court on Tuesday that the weapons belonged to her husband and that he had forbidden her and their two children to “come near the cupboard” where the arms were stored.
“Nothing was touched and it was full of dust,” she told the judges. “He was a soldier and I was not allowed to look at his things.”
About two dozen ultranationalists showed up at Tuesday’s hearing at Belgrade’s municipal court holding banners calling on Mladic to keep on hiding despite what they described as state “torture” of his wife.
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