A UN court said Saturday evening that Dutch authorities would not be conducting a criminal investigation into the death of Ratko Mladic, the convicted Bosnian Serb war criminal. Mladic, serving life in prison in The Hague for genocide and war crimes committed during the 1992-1995 Bosnian war, died in hospital on Thursday, having suffered several strokes in recent months. His age has always been a matter of dispute. He claimed to have been born in March 1943, but the tribunal listed his birth year as 1942 -- local media widely reported that he'd died at the age of 84. The International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals Mechanism said the Dutch authorities had carried out the procedures required by national law. On Friday, they had decided "that no criminal investigation would be opened and that they would not be conducting an autopsy", the statement added. The Mechanism said it had also appointed a judge, Iain Bonomy, to conduct a separate investigation into Mladic's death. That inquiry was still ongoing and details, for the moment, were confidential, it added. On Monday, days before Mladic's death, the Serbian authorities had called for his release on health grounds for treatment in Serbia. In May, the Mechanism had already rejected a request from his family for Mladic's release. Mladic, who was arrested in Serbia in 2011, had the verdict against him confirmed on appeal in 2021. One of the crimes ascribed to him was the July 1995 massacre of approximately 8,000 Bosnian men and boys in the eastern Srebrenica region -- the worst such atrocity in Europe since WWII. The Mechanism's role is to carry out the residual duties of the UN tribunals based in The Hague, including the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, which convicted Mladic.
