Former Croatian Serb leader Milan Babic, who pleaded guilty to crimes against humanity during the war in Croatia, committed suicide in the detention centre of the UN war crimes court in The Hague, the court said Monday.
"The detention unit medical officer confirmed Milan Babics death shortly after his body was found," it said. He killed himself on Sunday.
"The Dutch authorities were called immediately. After conducting an investigation, they confirmed that the cause of death was suicide."
The president of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), Italian judge Fausto Pocar, has ordered an internal inquiry, the court added.
According the unconfirmed reports the former Croatian Serb leader hanged himself.
Babic is not the first UN detainee to commit suicide in the Scheveningen prison. In 1998 another Croatian Serb accused, Slavko Dokmanovic, also took his own life.
Babic had been due Monday to finish up two weeks of testimony in the trial of Milan Martic, another Croatian Serb leader.
"He spent two weeks testifying in a very detailed way and at the start he made clear that he completely accepted his guilt and repeated his guilty plea," said Croatian Goran Jungvirth, who is following the trial for the Institute of War and Peace Reporting (IWPR) in The Hague.
Babic was testifying "very calmly, not losing his nerve", he added.
In November 2002, after being notified that he was named on the indictment against former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic as a member of a joint criminal enterprise, Babic contacted the court and agreed to testify against his former mentor.
In 2003 Babic was indicted himself by the UN court and surrendered, pleading guilty to crimes against humanity in January 2004.
Babic, a dentist by trade, became the mayor of the central Croatian town of Knin, a stronghold of separatist Serb rebels during the Croatian war that left 25,000 people dead.
He started to advocate the creation of an independent Serb state within Croatia. Later he became president of the self-proclaimed Serb republic of Krajina - an area that covered a third of Croatia - from May 1991 until February 15, 1992.
With Milosevic's backing, Babic went on to mobilise and arm rebel Serb fighters, and the so-called ethnic cleansing of Croats and other non-Serb populations in Krajina started.
In 1992, after their relationship began to cool, Babic was sidelined by Milosevic in favour of Goran Hadzic, the Serb leader of Slavonia in Croatia, who has also been indicted by the UN court. Hadzic remains at large.
Following his plea, Babic was sentenced to 13 years in prison in June 2004, more than the 11 years demanded by the prosecution. The judges ruled that Babic had played a much bigger role than his lawyer and the prosecution suggested.
The court said Babic "made inflammatory speeches during public events and in the media which prepared the ground for the Serb population to accept that their goals should be achieved through acts of persecution and amplified the consequences of the campaign of persecutions by allowing it to continue".
Besides testifying in the Milosevic and Martic trials, Babic also took the stand last year against former Bosnian Serb leader Momcilo Krajisnik and was expected to testify against other officials.
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