Ratko Mladic funeral draws crowds in Belgrade

Large crowds gathered in Belgrade on Monday for the funeral of convicted Bosnian Serb war criminal Ratko Mladic, whose public glorification by some Serb nationalists continues to divide the Balkans.

Mladic died aged 84 after spending his final years serving a life sentence in The Hague for war crimes committed in Bosnia. A Hague tribunal said the crimes included the 1995 Srebrenica massacre of about 8,000 Muslim men and boys, which the court ruled was genocide orchestrated by Mladic and Bosnian Serb political leader Radovan Karadzic.

At the funeral, large queues gathered to pay respects at the church where Mladic's coffin was displayed. A banner outside the church praised him as a hero. His casket had been welcomed to Belgrade draped in flags and carried from a government plane by soldiers.

Mladic remains deeply divisive in Serbia and in Bosnia's Serb-majority entity. His son, Darko Mladic, said on Friday that he was proud of his father's role.

Mladic cast himself as a defender of Serbs, but he oversaw the siege of Sarajevo for more than three years, during which snipers and artillery killed thousands of civilians. He was dismissed after being indicted in 1995 and avoided arrest for 16 years before being detained in northern Serbia in May 2011.

In Banja Luka, thousands attended vigils after his death. In Srebrenica, Sehida Abdurahmanovic, who lost her brother in the massacre, said history would remember him as a war criminal.