Butcher of Bosnia will be left to rot in a British jail
THE ‘Butcher of Bosnia’, Radovan Karadzic, will serve the rest of his life sentence for war crimes and genocide in a British jail.
The Bosnian Serb leader was convicted in 2016 of atrocities including the massacre of 8,000 Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica in 1995, regarded as one of the worst atrocities committed in Europe since the Second World War.
He will be transferred to the UK in the next few weeks, the Mail understands, and is set to die in a British prison.
A final decision is yet to be made on which jail will house Karadzic, who was once the world’s most wanted man, but the front-runner is believed to be Frankland highsecurity prison in County Durham, which already holds another war criminal, former Liberia president Charles Taylor.
Karadzic, 75, will be moved to this country as part of Britain’s ‘commitment to international law and justice’, a source said.
‘Karadzic was convicted of genocide for crimes committed almost 30 years ago. This demonstrates the long arm of international justice and Britain’s role in it,’ the source added. Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab said Britain had a ‘moral duty’ to ensure war criminals such as Karadzic faced justice.
He added: ‘If we want to deter these types of crime from happening, if we want to give justice to the many thousands of victims, I think it is right we do our bit.’
Prisoners convicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, the UN court that dealt with related war crimes – and other war crimes tribunals – are distributed between supportive member states. The UK holds four convicts, while Germany and Austria hold seven convicts each, Norway six, Spain five and France four.
It is effectively Britain’s turn to take responsibility for enforcing the sentence of the court.
Special measures will be put in place to protect Karadzic from revenge attacks by other inmates, particularly Islamist terrorists.
In 2010, Bosnian war criminal Radislav Krstic was subjected to a ‘revenge attack’ by three Muslim inmates who slashed him with blades in HMP Wakefield.
A source told The Times: ‘Karadzic won’t be spending much time outside his cell. There’ll be plenty of inmates who’d want to attack him.’ Karadzic was convicted of genocide and crimes against humanity in 2016 at a tribunal hearing in The Hague, and sentenced to serve 40 years, later increased to life.
Following the end of the Bosnian war, the psychiatrist-turned-politician evaded justice for more than a decade before he was arrested in 2008 in Belgrade. He was working as a doctor of alternative medicine under an assumed name, wearing his white hair in a plaited top-knot. He is currently being held in the UN detention centre in the Netherlands.
As well as Taylor, Frankland also holds Lee Rigby murderer Michael Adebolajo, Soham killer Ian Huntley and Levi Bellfield, who murdered Milly Dowler in 2002.
‘It is right that we do our bit’