After 16 years the hunt for Europe's most wanted man is finally over. General Ratko Mladic was the Bosnian Serb army chief throughout the Bosnian war - and the man many hold responsible for the worst atrocities in that bloody conflict.
Along with the Bosnian Serb political leader Radovan Karadzic, he came to symbolise the Serb campaign of ethnic cleansing of Croats and Muslims. Ratko Mladic was ferocious in pursuit of what he saw as the destiny of the Serb nation. He oversaw the siege and bombardment of Sarajevo, in which 12,000 died.
He was a pioneer of the technique known as ethnic cleansing. Hundreds of thousands of non-Serbs were driven from their homes in the brutal campaign to create an ethnically pure Serb state in Croatia and Bosnia and he commanded the men who murdered at least 7,500 Bosnian Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica in 1995.
When I worked for NatWest some years back I used to work with a guy who was part of the UN Peacekeeping Forces in Bosnia and he claimed that some of the acts that he witnessed were so horrific that they will haunt him for the rest of his life and he was powerless to stop it.
Let us hope that Mladic is brought to justice for war crimes quickly at The Hague.
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