Bosnian Croat war criminal Slobodan Praljak died after drinking poison at a UN tribunal in The Hague, where his sentence of 20 years was upheld. As soon as the judges at the international criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia upheld the verdict, Praljak shouted out angrily: “Praljak is not a criminal. I reject your verdict.” The 72-year-old then raised a small brown bottle to his lips, and drank it. As court officials surrounded the bearded Praljak, the presiding judge, Carmel Agius, immediately ordered the proceedings to be suspended. Within minutes, an ambulance arrived and Praljak was taken to hospital but officially declared dead a few hours later.
An investigation is likely to be launched into who supplied him with the poison and how he could have smuggled the bottle into court. At the request of the tribunal, the Dutch authorities have initiated an independent investigation. Croatian prime minister Andrej Plenković while confirming Praljak’s death offered his condolences to the family.
The incident came as judges were handing down their ruling in the appeals case of six former Bosnian Croat political and military leaders accused of war crimes during the bloody breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Praljak was charged with ordering the destruction of Mostar’s 16th-century bridge in November 1993, which judges in the first trial had said “caused disproportionate damage to the Muslim civilian population”.
A symbol of Bosnia’s devastation in the war, the Ottoman-era bridge was later rebuilt. The city experienced some of the worst Croat-Muslim clashes, with nearly 80% of its eastern area destroyed in the fighting. In their ruling, the judges allowed part of Praljak’s appeal, saying the bridge had been a legitimate military target during the conflict. They also overturned some of his convictions but refused to reduce his overall sentence. Praljak had completed a significant proportion of his sentence. Before the Bosnian conflict, he had been a writer and film director.
Earlier in the proceedings, the judges had upheld a 25-year prison term against Jadranko Prlić, the former prime minister of a breakaway Bosnian Croat state, Herceg-Bosna, and a 20-year term for its former defence minister Bruno Stojić. The 1992-95 war in Bosnia, in which 100,000 people died and 2.2 million were displaced, mainly pitted Bosnian Muslims against Bosnian Serbs, but also saw brutal fighting between Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Croats after an initial alliance fell apart.
