Ratko Mladic funeral: EU chiefs call images shocking

European Council President Antonio Costa and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said the presence of Serbian officials at Ratko Mladic's funeral was “deeply regrettable” and called images from the funeral “shocking”.

“The elements of official support and the presence of some senior Serbian officials at the funeral are deeply regrettable,” the two EU leaders said in a statement on social media on Tuesday.

Mladic, the convicted Bosnian Serb wartime commander, was buried in Belgrade at a service attended by thousands. He died in The Hague last month, aged 84, while serving a life sentence for genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity committed during the 1990s Bosnian war.

Several Serbian ministers attended the funeral, along with Russia's ambassador to Serbia and Milorad Dodik, the former president of Bosnia's Serb entity. Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic did not attend and said earlier that the state would ensure the event passed safely.

The European Union had already condemned what it called the glorification of war criminals around the funeral. An EU spokesman said on Monday that “any glorification of war criminals, genocide denial and revisionism” contradicted fundamental European values and had no place in the EU or in candidate countries.

Mladic was convicted by a United Nations war crimes court of genocide over the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, in which Bosnian Serb forces killed around 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys in a UN-protected safe zone.

He was also convicted of persecuting and forcibly expelling Bosnian Muslims and Croats, terrorising civilians during the siege of Sarajevo and taking UN peacekeepers hostage during NATO airstrikes in 1995.