Croatia’s state TV says Slobodan Praljak who claimed to have taken poison just after his 20-year sentence was upheld by appeals judges at a U.N. war crimes tribunal, has died.
Dutch police will not comment on the TV report based on “sources close to Gen. Praljak.”
Spokesman for the tribunal Nenad Golcevski, when asked by the AP if he could confirm the death, said: “I have no information to share at this point.”
Praljak, 72, drank from a bottle shortly after appeals judges confirmed his sentence for involvement in a campaign to drive Muslims out of a would-be Bosnian Croat ministate in Bosnia in the early 1990s.
Praljak is a Bosnian Croat writer and film and theater director turned wartime general.
The 72-year-old is one of six Bosnian Croat political and military leaders who with significant support from neighboring Croatia turned against the Bosnian Army during the 1992-95 war, trying to establish an ethnically homogenous Croat region within Bosnia by force, just like Bosnian Serbs did in other areas with help from Serbia.
Before the war, Praljak directed in various theaters, including in Mostar where he was eventually accused of command responsibility for the destruction of the Old Bridge in Mostar, one of the most striking Ottoman monuments in the Balkans, and a jewel of Bosnia’s Islamic heritage.
A judge at the U.N. war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia says that the court room where a convicted war criminal claimed to have taken poison is now being considered as a crime scene.
