Bosnian Serb wartime general Ratko Mladic is fit to be extradited to the United Nations war crimes tribunal in The Hague and has until Monday to appeal, a judge at a special Serbian war crimes court said on Friday.
“Mladic’s lawyer was delivered the extradition papers and he has until Monday to appeal,” judge Maja Kovacevic said. She said Mladic had been examined by a medical commission, “which has determined he is fit for further proceedings”.
Mladic’s lawyer Milos Saljic said he would appeal against the extradition on Monday and insisted that Mladic could not be handed over to The Hague until his health was stable.
“He must be provided with adequate treatment before the extradition,” he told reporters.
Mladic’s son Darko said: “We are almost certain he cannot be extradited in such a condition … He is in very bad shape. His right arm is half-paralysed. His right side is partly numb.”
Mladic, accused of orchestrating the 43-month siege of the Bosnian capital Sarajevo and the massacre of 8,000 Muslims from the town of Srebrenica in July 1995, was found on Thursday in a farmhouse owned by a cousin about 100 km (60 miles) from Belgrade.
The arrest of Mladic, the last of the three men accused of instigating ethnic cleansing during the 1992-95 Bosnian war, was expected to remove a major obstacle in the former pariah state’s quest to join the European Union.