War criminal Ratko Mladić's jail release request denied

It was not immediately clear whether Mladić would be able to appeal against the decision.Earlier this month, his lawyers said he had already been bedridden or in a wheelchair for a long time.But they said he had then suffered a suspected stroke during a call with his son that left him almost unable to speak.They said two doctors had assessed his condition as serious and the "risk of imminent death is high", calling for his immediate provisional or conditional release to a hospital or hospice where the Serbian language is spoken.It was implicit that the defence team had been seeking his return home, with Serbia's government making it clear it would be prepared to provide guarantees to the court if they released him.Mladic commanded Bosnian Serb forces in the 1990s against the Bosnian Croat and Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) armies, during a war in which his troops committed "ethnic cleansing" in Bosnia-Herzegovina, besieged the main city of Sarajevo with the deaths of more than 10,000 people, and carried out the massacre of 8,000 men and boys at Srebrenica.More than 100,000 people were killed and about two million displaced during the Bosnian War. Mladic disappeared in 1995 and was only tracked down in rural Serbia in 2011 after 16 years on the run. He went on trial at The Hague in 2012 and was convicted in 2017.