(ANSA-AFP) - SARAJEVO, 15 SET - A Bosnian Serb political
leader who was jailed for 20 years by a UN court for his role in
Bosnia's 1990s war died on Tuesday of coronavirus, state media
reported. Momcilo Krajisnik, a former key ally of the Bosnian
Serbs' wartime political leader Radovan Karadzic, passed away in
a hospital in the northern town of Banja Luka, the hospital said
in a statement quoted by the public RTRS television. During
Bosnia's 1992-1995 conflict Krajisnik, a hardline Serb
nationalist who was fiercely anti-Muslim, served as speaker of
the Bosnian Serb parliament. The 75-year-old was taken to
hospital in late August as his health deteriorated. Krajisnik
was arrested in Bosnia in 2000 and six years later convicted by
the Hague-based International Criminal Tribunal for the former
Yugoslavia (ICTY) of forcibly expelling non-Serbs and crimes
against humanity. The war, which pitted Bosnia's Croat, Muslim
and Serb communities against each other, claimed some 100,000
lives and forced 2.2 million people, half the country's pre-war
population, to flee their homes. Krajisnik's initial 27-year
sentence was later cut on appeal to 20 years and in 2013 he was
granted early release from a British prison. He received a
hero's welcome from several thousand fellow Serbs upon returning
to the Bosnian Serb wartime stronghold of Pale. The country's
communities are still sharply divided a quarter of a century
after the war. Karadzic himself is serving a life sentence for
genocide and other atrocities. (ANSA-AFP).
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