Serb nationalist Vojislav Šešelj acquitted of war crimes at The Hague
Source: The Guardian
Serb ultranationalist Vojislav Šešelj has been acquitted of all nine charges of committing atrocities by the international criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.
The former deputy prime minister of Serbia, 61, who is being treated for cancer, had been accused of recruiting and arming the Serb paramilitaries blamed for carrying out war crimes in Bosnia and Croatia during the early 1990s.
The ruling comes less than a week after the former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadžić was sentenced to 40 years in prison after being found guilty of genocide over the 1995 massacre in Srebrenica. Šešelj, however, was found to have had no military “hierarchical responsibility” for the volunteers that he encouraged to join the Serb army.
Croatia on Thursday banned Šešelj from entering the country after prime minister Tihomir Orešković labelled the verdict “shameful” during a visit to Vukovar, scene of some of the alleged atrocities, where he laid wreaths in memory of war dead.
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Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/law/2016/mar/31/serb-nationalist-vojislav-seselj-acquitted-war-crimes-crimes-against-humanity-icty-the-hague
Owen Bowcott Legal affairs correspondent
Thursday 31 March 2016 13.29 BST Last modified on Thursday 31 March 2016 16.42 BST