Defiant Mladic taunts survivors

Bosnian Serb general Ratko Mladic made a throat-slitting gesture to a woman who lost her son, husband, and brothers in the Srebenica massacre at the start of his trial yesterday for some of the worst atrocities in Europe since the Second World War.

Mladic, 70, flashed a defiant thumbs-up as he entered the courtroom — the last of the main protagonists in the Balkan wars of the 1990s to go on trial at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague.

A hero to Serb nationalists, the “Butcher of Bosnia” to his Muslim and Croat victims, the general eluded justice for 16 years until his capture in a cousin’s farmhouse in Serbia last May.