Mladic tells war crimes court he is ‘gravely ill’

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Wartime Bosnian Serb Army Chief Ratko Mladic said on Friday he was a “gravely ill man” as he made his first appearance before a UN court in The Hague after 16 years on the run from genocide charges.

“I am a gravely ill man,” the man dubbed the “Butcher of Bosnia” told judge Alphons Orie of the International criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.

“I was in such a poor state,” he added, describing his arrival at the tribunal’s detention unit in The Hague on Tuesday.

The 69-year-old is accused of masterminding the Srebrenica massacre of 8,000 Muslim men and boys — Europe’s worst mass killing since World War II — and the 44-month siege of the capital Sarajevo from May 1992 in which 10,000 died.