The Serbian authorities have begun preparations for the funeral of the former Serb-Bosnian commander Ratko Mladic, who passed away on August 27 while serving a sentence in a prison in The Hague for war crimes and crimes against humanity, after his body arrived on Thursday at Belgrade airport aboard a government plane.
The body of Mladic, which has already been taken to the Military Medical Academy for an autopsy, landed on Thursday afternoon in the Serbian capital coming from The Hague on a flight that included his son, Darko, and the Minister of Justice of Serbia, Nenad Vujic, among other companions.
The coffin was received on the runway by Serbian Army personnel and covered with the flags of Serbia and the Republic of Srpska, the Serb-majority entity that is part of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Subsequently, the military transported the coffin to the vehicle that took the remains to the Military Medical Academy.
This Friday, Darko Mladic will hold a press conference alongside the former commander's lawyer, Dragan Ivetic, to detail the schedule of the planned events, according to the Serbian state agency Tanjug. Some local media are already indicating that the burial could take place on Monday at the Topcider cemetery.
Additionally, a tribute is scheduled for this Saturday at the Army House, also in Belgrade, as reported by the public television RTS, pending final confirmation from Mladic's family and the Serbian government.
The President of Serbia, Aleksandar Vucic, emphasized on Thursday that the authorities will take care of "providing all kinds of support, logistics, and transportation" in order to "preserve public order, peace, and security" during Mladic's funeral, nicknamed 'the butcher of Bosnia' and convicted in November 2017 for crimes committed during the Bosnia war (1992-1995).
The International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals confirmed the delivery of the former commander's remains to his family at Rotterdam-The Hague airport, from where the plane departed for Nikola Tesla airport in Belgrade.
The Dutch authorities announced on August 28 that they would not open a criminal case for Mladic's death in custody and that they would not perform an autopsy, after which the mechanism indicated that it was in contact with the family to discuss "the transfer of Mladic's remains."
Mladic --convicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) after being found guilty of ten charges, including genocide in Srebrenica in July 1995-- died "while he was hospitalized in The Hague," as specified by the mechanism itself.