Bosnian War

That he was also a common crook who served 11 months in prison for fraud in 1984 was not part of this carefully crafted public persona.

On a weekday afternoon in the Serbian capital Belgrade, a small watering hole called Luda Kuca - Madhouse - is crammed with elderly but chatty regulars.

A total of 1,601 boys and girls lost their lives during the siege of Sarajevo. One of them was Mirza Imamovic.

His mother Zlatka Imamovic recalled how one day she heard an explosion and ran out of the house with her husband, calling for Mirza, who was playing outside.

Two controversial new commissions set up by the Republika Srpska government to examine wartime crimes in Srebrenica and Sarajevo are to hold their first meetings in late March despite widespread concerns raised by international experts, diplomats and Bosniak war victims' organisations that their aim is to rewrite history.

The verdict acquitting former Croatian Defence Council commander Mile Puljic, who was cleared of crimes against prisoners in Mostar in 1993 and 1994, was quashed and a retrial ordered.

Bosnia’s Serb-dominated entity Republika Srpska has appointed Israeli historian and Holocaust researcher Gideon Greif to head its controversial commission probing crimes committed in Srebrenica during the Bosnian war.

Former Bosnian Serb soldier Vuk Ratkovic’s conviction for the multiple rape of a women in Visegrad during the war in 1992 and 1993 was upheld on appeal.

The retrial of former Bosnian Army soldiers Samir Kesmer and Mirsad Menzilovic, accused of raping a Serb minor in Sarajevo in May 1993, opened at the Bosnian state court.

In its closing statement, former Serb reservist policeman Slavko Milovanovic’s defence called on the court to acquit him of persecuting Bosniak civilians in the Skelani area near Srebrenica in 1992.

The Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina has charged Munib Ahmetspahic - who was previously acquitted of having a role in the 2011 attack on the US embassy in Bosnia - with membership of a terrorist formation in Syria.