The body of Ratko Mladić, the Bosnian Serb military commander convicted of genocide, arrived in Belgrade on Thursday aboard a Serbian government aircraft, where it was met with military honours, a police motorcade, and crowds of supporters — a reception that has drawn sharp international criticism.

Mladić, who died on 27 August at the age of 84 while serving a life sentence at the UN detention facility in Scheveningen, the Netherlands, was one of the most consequential figures of the 1990s Balkan wars. He was convicted in 2017 by the international tribunal in The Hague of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes committed during the 1992–95 war in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Among his gravest crimes was the Srebrenica massacre of 1995, in which approximately 8,400 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were killed under his command — the worst act of genocide on European soil since the Second World War.

At Belgrade's airport, an army honour guard carried his flag-draped coffin from the plane to a waiting vehicle, with the scene broadcast live on the pro-government television channel Informer TV. Along the highway into the capital, footage showed supporters gathered on motorway overpasses holding banners reading