Ratko Mladic was a shadow of the swaggering general who once “held Sarajevo in the palm of his hand” during Bosnia’s 1992-95 war as his long-awaited genocide trial opened – but he still managed to inflame Bosnia’s festering war wounds with the flick of his hand.

UN police today began returning to the Serb-held town in northern Kosovo where protesters with guns and hand grenades killed one of their colleagues and wounded dozens more.

At least seven international police officers have been wounded in a shoot-out today near a prison in northern Kosovo, a UN spokesman and a Serb doctor said.