At Rotterdam airport today a flight landed from Serbia. On board the flight was the former Serbian leader Radovan Karadzic who is to stand trial at the war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia at The Hague for probably the single most serious crime in the world: genocide.
Karadzic faces 11 counts including genocide, extermination and persecution. The prosecution aledges that Karadzic was the mastermind behind atrocities such as the 1995 massacre of 8,000 Muslim men and boys in the Bosnian town of Srebrenica and the deadly siege of Sarajevo.
A spokesperson for the UN has confirmed that Karadzic is in UN custody at the detention centre near the court where he will stand trial.
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UPDATE: Karadzic will appear before the tribunal at The Hague on the afternoon of Thursday 31 July 2008 to hear the charges against him. He will then have a period of 30 days to enter his plea in answer to the charges. This is going to be a long and complex case. We will know tomorrow the exact details of the indictment against him.