'Butcher of Bosnia'
Ratko Mladic, who was convicted of genocide yesterday, believed himself to be a crusading defender of the Serbs but was dubbed the "Butcher of Bosnia" for mass slaughter at the hands of his forces.
The ruthless commander of Bosnian Serb troops in the 1990s civil war, Mladic came to symbolise a barbaric plan to rid swathes of Bosnian territory of Croats and Muslims and carve out a Serb-only state.
The UN rights chief Zeid Ra'ad al Hussein described him as "the epitome of evil" after the verdict.
He was captured in 2011 after 16 years on the run..
The 74-year-old remains a hero to many Serbs to this day.
To the families of war victims, he will forever be associated with the bloody 44-month siege of Sarajevo and the 1995 massacre of 8,000 Muslims in Srebrenica.
Mladic presented the sacking of the eastern Bosnian enclave as retribution against "the Turks" for a massacre of Serbs under the Ottoman Empire, wrote journalist Julian Borger in his book "The Butcher's Trail", published last year.
"He reassured panicked Muslim women captives that their loved ones would be safe at the same time his soldiers were rounding up and slaughtering eight thousand of their husbands and sons," Borger wrote.
Born in the village of Bozinovici in eastern Bosnia, Mladic's life was struck by bloodshed and tragedy as a toddler, when his father was killed in battle by the Ustasha, Croatia's fascist World War II regime.
Mladic followed his parent's military path and was a colonel in the Yugoslav army when the federation began to crumble in June 1991.He was sent to organise the Serb-dominated army in Croatia, and the following May he was made commander of Bosnian Serb forces, tasked with seizing land across Bosnia for Serbs.
In 1994, at the height of the war, Mladic's only daughter Ana committed suicide in Belgrade, aged 23, with her father's favourite pistol.
Those close to the general were reported as saying that he was pushed over the edge by her death, which came a year before the Srebrenica massacre took place.
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