Convicted war criminal and first speaker of Bosnia's Republika Srpska (RS) entity National Assembly Momcilo Krajisnik has died from Covid-19 in the RS administrative centre, Banja Luka, the RS University Clinical Centre (UCC) said on Tuesday.

“We inform the public and the media that Momcilo Krajisnik, the first Speaker of the RS National Assembly, had passed away this morning, September 15, 2020, at 6:00 am at the Clinic for Intensive Care Medicine of the UCC RS, as a result of infection with the new coronavirus. The UCC RS management, headed by General Manager Vlado Djajic expresses his sincere condolences to the family of the deceased,” the statement from the UCC said.

Krajisnik was convicted to a 27-year-sentence in 2006 for crimes against humanity, including extermination, murder, persecution, deportation, and forced transfer. He was acquitted of the charges of murder as a war crime, genocide, and complicity in genocide.

The judges of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) found that Krajisnik was part of a joint criminal enterprise which carried out the extermination, murder, persecution and deportation of non-Serbs during the Bosnian war of 1992 – 1995.

He was acquitted of genocide or complicity in genocide on the grounds that the court had found no evidence of a genocidal intent on his part to destroy in full or part ethnic or religious communities.

The charges of murder and extermination were dropped in 2009 and the sentence was reduced to 20 years. While the ICTY judges found that while there was evidence that crimes committed in Bosnia constituted the criminal act of genocide, they did not establish that the accused possessed genocidal intent, or was part of a criminal enterprise that had such an intent.