A UN court has pronounced former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic guilty of genocide for the 1995 Srebrenica massacre and sentenced him to 40 years in jail.
The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague found that Karadzic was guilty of 10 out of 11 charges of war crimes.
The court said the 70-year-old was responsible for the siege of Sarajevo and that he intended to exterminate Bosnian Muslim men in Srebrenica.
As many as 8,000 Muslims were killed by Bosnian Serb forces in Srebrenica during the Bosnian war.
"Karadzic was in agreement with the plan of the killings," presiding judge O-Gon Kwon said.
The court also found him guilty of crimes against humanity for his role in the siege and shelling of Sarajevo and the death of more than 12,000 people.
However, Karadzic denied the charges, saying atrocities in the war were perpetrated by rogue elements, not by forces under his command.
Collapse of Yugoslavia
His lawyer said Kardazic, a trained doctor by profession, will appeal against the verdict. "Dr Karadzic is disappointed and astonished. He feels that he was convicted on inference instead of evidence and will appeal [against] the judgement," lawyer Peter Robinson said, according to BBC.
The Bosnian war in the early 1990s had lasted four years and resulted in the death of more than 100,000 people.
Karadzic emerged as the leader of the Bosnian Serb people after the collapse of Yugoslavia and became the president of the Serbian Democratic Party in 1990.
He led the Serb Republic armed forces as its Supreme Commander. He was on the run after the war ended with a US-brokered peace deal and Karadzic was on the run for eleven years before his arrest in 2008.
