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 charged with recruiting and arming the Serb paramilitaries blamed for carrying out atrocities in Bosnia and Croatia during the early 1990s. 

Šešelj was not at the courtroom in The Hague to hear the verdict. He had repeatedly refused to cooperate with the tribunal, staging a hunger strike, refusing to enter a plea and declining to present a defence. He had been allowed to return to Serbia because of his deteriorating health.

Prosecutors had charged Šešelj, who founded the Serbian Radical party, with three counts of crimes against humanity and six counts of war crimes. The accusations included torture, murder, forcible deportations and persecution on religious and racial grounds.

Šešelj was alleged to have propagated an inflammatory policy of uniting “all Serbian lands” in a homogeneous Serbian state, which he referred to as greater Serbia.

Delivering the not guilty verdict, the ICTY’s presiding judge, Jean-Claude Antonetti, said: “Following this verdict, Vojislav Šešelj is now a free man.”

It 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.

(The Guardian)