(CNN) — Former Bosnian Serb wartime army leader Ratko Mladic has been sentenced to life in prison Wednesday after being found guilty of genocide over atrocities committed during the Bosnian war from 1992 to 1995.
Verdict proceedings had been interrupted earlier when the 74-year-old’s legal team claimed that his blood pressure was too high to continue.
After outbursts from Mladic, Judge Alphons Orie, who was delivering a summation of the case, ordered the removal of the ex-general, telling him he could monitor proceedings by audio and video.
Mladic’s legal team had asked for proceedings to be halted or for the summation of the case to be skipped, which the Judge refused.
Mladic was charged with two counts of genocide, and nine crimes against humanity and war crimes for his role in the conflict in the former Yugoslavia from 1992 to 1995, during which 100,000 people were killed and another 2.2 million displaced. He was found not guilty on one charge of genocide.
The trial, which opened in 2012, took place at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague, Netherlands. The ad-hoc court was established to prosecute crimes committed during the Balkans conflict.
Mladic was accused of orchestrating a campaign of ethnic cleansing, including the slaughter of thousands of Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica in July 1995. It is the worst massacre to have taken place in Europe since the Second World War.
Arrested in 2011, Mladic’s trial has lasted 530 days, included more than 500 witnesses and nearly 10,000 exhibits.
Before the case was adjourned last December, prosecutors recommended a life sentence. Mladic had previously referred to the court as “satanic” and labeled the charges against him as “obnoxious.”
Who is Ratko Mladic?
The ex-general — accused of being “the Butcher of Bosnia” — was in command of the Bosnian Serb army which entered the town of Srebrenica in July 1995. In the days which followed, 8,000 Muslim men and boys were systematically slaughtered by troops under his leadership.
The late Bosnia peace negotiator Richard Holbrooke once described Mladic as “one of those lethal combinations that history thrusts up occasionally — a charismatic murderer.”
Mladic faced charges over his actions during the siege of Sarajevo where his heavily armed forces cut the city off from the outside world. Serb forces pounded the city from higher ground positions each day, trapping Sarajevo’s residents in the valley below. More than 10,000 people, mostly civilians, perished.
As the war ended in 1995, Mladic went on the run before being found 16 years later when police burst into the garden of a small house in northern Serbia.
Though he was carrying two handguns, he surrendered without a fight. He was extradited for trial in the Netherlands.
In 2011, a tribunal judge entered not guilty pleas for Mladic after he refused to cooperate and was forcibly removed from the courtroom at the judge’s order.
Mladic’s judgment day comes more than a year after Bosnian Serb political leader Radovan Karadzic was sentenced to 40 years in prison in March 2016, for his role in the 1990s conflict.
Former Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic was arrested in 2001 but died before his trial could be completed.
The-CNN-Wire™ & © 2017 Cable News Network, Inc., a Time Warner Company. All rights reserved. (Photo: CNN)
