The Bosnian Serb general is accused of killing thousands of civilians at Srebrenica and Sarajevo – the worst atrocities in Europe since the Nazi era. Julian Borger tells the inside story of how he evaded capture for so long and was finally caught

In July 1997, a Yugoslav army officer named Milan Gunj received an urgent phone call at home in Belgrade. Something strange was happening at work and he was needed immediately.

Staff Sergeant Gunj’s job could best be described as that of an army hotelier. He had risen through the ranks from barracks cook and caterer to the rather pleasant task of looking after a string of gated and guarded holiday homes the Yugoslav military had traditionally provided for its top brass. The man calling him on this summer day was a soldier who worked in one of these bucolic retreats, at a place called Rajac in the wooded hills of central Serbia. Some unexpected guests had arrived. The soldier dared not say any more on the phone, but he was insistent Gunj come as soon as possible.

A few moments later, he received a second call. This time it was from an aide in the office of the Yugoslav chief of the general staff, ordering Gunj to get to Rajac immediately and deal with his visitors. He would be told what he needed to know when he arrived. He got in his car and headed south.

Two hours later, he arrived at Rajac after dusk and found a group of about a dozen armed men in civilian clothes milling around the entrance, and then the reason for all the subterfuge came striding out of the hotel lobby, as if he had just commandeered the place: the unmistakable barrel-chested figure and blunt ruddy face Gunj had seen in a hundred news reports of the Bosnian war – General Ratko Mladić.

Play Video 1:55 Ratko Mladić, the 'butcher of Bosnia' – video profile

“I was somewhat surprised, scared, and confused by this turn of events,” Gunj recalled. “First of all, because this was in my compound, and I had no information that this would happen. And secondly, I know that Mr Ratko Mladić has been accused of certain acts by the Hague tribunal. So at that point in time I was in a state of panic.”

Gunj was by no means alone in feeling terror in Mladić’s presence. The general stood accused of the worst atrocities Europe had witnessed since the Nazi era. The Bosnian Serb general had overseen three years of the Sarajevo siege and the daily attrition of its residents by shelling and sniper fire. He was also there when the Muslim enclave of Srebrenica was overrun by his troops in July 1995. Presenting himself as an instrument of national retribution, he declared the sacking of Srebrenica as payback against “the Turks” for a massacre of Serbs under the Ottoman empire. Mladić reassured panicked captive Muslim women that their loved ones would be safe at the same time that his soldiers were rounding up and slaughtering 8,000 husbands and sons. The beetroot-faced officer who had turned up to stay at Gunj’s vacation home was the world’s most wanted man.

Mladić and his entourage stayed for a month in Rajac before departing – again in the middle of the night – for another military resort, at Stragari, near the city of Kragujevac, a more elaborate sylvan hideaway with sports grounds, swimming pools, and table tennis. For the benefit of hunters, the surrounding woods were stocked with deer and mouflon, a species of wild sheep with flamboyantly curved horns.

General Djordje Ćurčin, an old family friend of Mladić, described a typical day with the fugitive: “We talked, we walked through the woods, we played some chess. We also played cards, table tennis. We had lunch. And then we walked some more.”

Such was the determination of the Yugoslav general staff to keep Mladić both comfortable and hidden that an entire department, the 30th Personnel Centre, originally set up to oversee the social welfare of former Bosnian Serb officers, was tasked with looking after him. A substantial personal protection force was established.

“There was a bounty of $5m on Mladić’s head, and it was considered necessary to set up a unit that would protect him from various bounty hunters and criminals. This unit was attached to the 30th Personnel Centre in Belgrade and consisted of Republika Srpska army members, at times about 100 of them,” said Jovo Djogo, a former officer with the centre who went on to be Mladić’s personal security chief.

The Yugoslav government of Slobodan Milošević staunchly denied any responsibility for the mass atrocities committed by the Bosnian Serb military, but the elaborate measures taken in Belgrade to tend to Mladić’s safety and comfort after the war are a testament to close ties. In the aftermath of the Bosnian war, the Yugoslav army was an overwhelmingly Serb force. And as far as its commanders were concerned, Mladić was one of them.

Along with a formidable phalanx of guards, Mladić had a driver, his own cook, even his own personal waiter who would travel with him back to Rajac in the late winter of each year. When the season was over and the deer hunters had departed, the entourage would return like a travelling court. During this period, Mladić also spent a considerable amount of time in Belgrade, at his family home on Blagoja Parovića Street in the upmarket suburb of Košutnjak. He went out to restaurants and football matches in the Serbian capital. Video of these days shows a relaxed Mladić playing table tennis at Stragari, theatrically ruing a missed shot, and presiding over family celebrations.

The men and women who helped keep the fugitive general in this contented bubble saw him as a national hero, embodying the martial virtues of Serb legends from other eras. Somehow they managed to persuade themselves that within this crude stub of a man was an echo of Serbia’s heroic age. But just in case their loyalty should ever waver, they were shown photographs of their children – a characteristically direct reminder of the high price paid by informants.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Mladić in Srebrenica on 12 July 1995. ‘He reassured panicked captive Muslim women that their loved ones would be safe at the same time that his soldiers were rounding up and slaughtering 8,000 husbands and sons.’ Photograph: Art Zamur/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images

In his 14 years on the run, Mladić depended on a succession of institutions and groups to keep him from being captured: first the Serbian military establishment; then a closer coterie of his Bosnian Serb wartime lieutenants; and finally, when those concentric rings fell away, like layers of a withered onion, his troubled family. But the common factor was fear.

* * *

Mladić was born into conflict. He was the wartime child of a Partisan family in the mountains south-east of Sarajevo. His father, Nedja, was killed in 1945 in a battle with forces of the Nazi-backed Ustasha. After a short apprenticeship as a tinsmith, Mladić followed him into the military, going to officer school and commanding Yugoslav army units in Macedonia and Kosovo.

By the time the country disintegrated in 1991, Mladić was a colonel and was sent to fight for the Yugoslav army against Croat separatist forces. There he won a reputation for courage bordering on recklessness – personally leading demining expeditions, for example. When the war spilled into Bosnia the following year, Mladić and his fellow Bosnian Serb officers changed uniforms and insignia, transferring formal allegiance overnight from Yugoslavia to the breakaway Republika Srpska. But the mission and ultimate leader remained the same, conquering territory for Serbs under a chain of command that led all the way up to President Milošević in Belgrade.

As a newly minted general, Mladić helped cut off and bombard his former neighbours in Sarajevo in May 1992, beginning the longest city siege in modern warfare. Three-and-a-half years later, 10,000 of the city’s residents would be dead. At Radovan Karadžić’s side as the head of the Bosnian Serb army, he led a ferocious campaign to dismember Bosnia and establish an ethnically pure Republika Srpska. But General Mladić was never so busy with the war that he could not take the occasional weekend off to play board games and relax with his wife and two grown children, Darko and Ana, whom he kept safe in Belgrade.

At these game nights, no one was allowed to mention politics or the war, but that did not stop the conflict from pulling the family apart. Ana was in her early 20s and had fallen in love with a young doctor – a human rights activist who believed his putative father-in-law to be a war criminal. He would only marry Ana if she renounced her father. Unable to do that or to give up her dreams of love and marriage, she took her father’s favourite pistol from its display case after a night of board games in February 1994 and shot herself.

Mladić could not accept his daughter’s suicide. He found solace instead in conspiracy theories that put the blame on his enemies. It was a conviction that took the burden of guilt off his shoulders and deepened a reservoir of hatred toward non-Serbs.

* * *

The Serb generals in the Yugoslav military establishment stood ready to shelter Mladić, no matter what appalling deeds he was accused of, but at the turn of the millennium, Serbia itself was undergoing rapid change. Milošević had been defeated in Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia, and then again in 1999, in Kosovo, supposedly the cradle of Serb civilisation. The dream of a Greater Serbia had collapsed, leaving an impoverished rump.

Milošević’s fall from power on 5 October 2000, and his delivery to The Hague the following June, set Mladić on edge. He had been no fan of Milošević, but the regime had provided him with succour and protection, and now it was gone. Ćurčin recalled that “on the night when Mr Milošević was arrested, he was in his own home, in his own apartment, and that night he left. When I saw him later on and spoke with him, he was visibly concerned for his security and the security of the people close to him. And he was determined not to surrender alive.”

Mladić was canny enough to realise that he could no longer rely on the Belgrade government to protect him. He hastily moved camp to yet another base, Krčmar, near Valjevo, a Tito-era refuge set in countryside every bit as pretty as Stragari, but with stronger fortifications and underground bunkers. From now on, Mladić would be in perpetual retreat, as the post- Milošević government in Belgrade steadily asserted its authority over the country’s security apparatus. It formally declared Mladić’s retirement from the military in March 2002, and early the following month a decree was issued legalising cooperation with the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). The era when Mladić could live out his time on the run in the army’s luxury spas was fast coming to an end.

Reluctantly, the generals told Mladić he would have to leave Krčmar, but his initial response was defiance mixed with delusion. He ordered his bodyguards to hold their ground, triggering an uneasy standoff in May 2002, during which the army buzzed the base with helicopters in mock raids intended to rattle him into leaving. On 1 June, Mladić finally bowed to the pressure and negotiated safe passage out of the base, while the army agreed to provide a convoy of staff cars to take him to his next hideout.

Mladić left behind the comforts of full military protection and embarked on a steady descent into isolation and privation. His support network shrunk almost overnight from the entire Yugoslav military to a handful of old comrades from the Bosnian war.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest People running for cover from Serb sniper fire in Sarajevo in 1993. Ten thousand people were killed during the three-year siege of the city by forces under the command of Ratko Mladic. Photograph: Chris Helgren/Reuters

The network was run from day to day by Djogo. This former Bosnian Serb colonel and fervent Mladić loyalist was from the same Bosnian district, and he managed the renting of a series of apartments for the general in the warren of tower blocks in New Belgrade. Green fields, woodland walks, and the life of a privileged military veteran were replaced by the concrete realities of urban Serbia.

“After the army said they would not look after him, he went to Jovo Djogo and a small team of people who cared for him,” said Mladić’s lawyer Miloš Šaljić. “In New Belgrade, he stayed inside the apartment and he was brought food and papers, and unlike in the military facilities, his family couldn’t come to see him.”

“The rented apartments had very precise specifications,” recalled Miodrag “Miki” Rakić, the Serbian presidential aide who coordinated the hunt. “They had to be in large buildings, but they could not be on the first floor, or on the top floor. He wanted nothing with security guards or security cameras.”

It was an unsettled existence for the first few months, until the network found an apartment on Yuri Gagarin Street that Mladić felt safe in. He was living just a few doors down from Karadžić – two fugitives from genocide charges in the space of a few blocks. Despite the proximity, there is no evidence the two crossed paths. They could not bear each other by this time, and investigators believe that there was little or no overlap between their support networks.

The two men also approached the life of a fugitive with entirely different strategies. Karadžić hid in plain sight, under the flamboyant assumed identity of a new age healer. Mladić hunkered down and maintained military self-discipline, banning the use of mobile phones in the apartment and rarely venturing out, except for an occasional evening walk along the Sava River with Darko, his only surviving child.

Meanwhile, for the handful of men and women in Mladić’s inner circle, he was a demanding guest. He wanted warm milk and honey early in the morning before his exercises. He required all his food to be fresh, bought the same day it was consumed. If it was uneaten by the evening, it was thrown away. Fruit and vegetables had to be bought from a range of stalls on the baffling grounds that their purchase from a single supplier would somehow arouse suspicion.

For most of his time in hiding, Mladić was careful about his appearance, shaving and grooming every day. One of his minders once asked him why he bothered. After all, it was not as if he was holding business meetings, she said. He replied that the way you looked at the moment of your death is the way you would look for the eternity of the afterlife. He was fastidious about his teeth too, but for more mundane reasons. He feared a trip to a dentist would compromise his security.

* * *

Such were the parameters of Mladić’s life until 12 March 2003, when the whole country was plunged back into turmoil by sudden violence. Zoran Đinđić, Serbia’s prime minister, was shot by a sniper as he walked into a government building in Belgrade, killed on the orders of a consortium of paramilitary gang leaders and crime bosses. They envisaged the murder as a preemptive strike against Đinđić’s plans to smash organised crime and his readiness to cooperate with the Hague tribunal.

The Đinđić shooting came as an ugly shock to a country craving normality after Milošević’s years of turmoil and bloodshed, and there was a backlash from the mainstream security forces that his killers could not have foreseen. The wave of more than 13,000 arrests that followed came sufficiently close to Mladić’s network for him to tighten his house rules still further. Up to this point, his close protection team had stayed with him, sometimes sleeping on the floor. After Đinđić’s assassination, Mladić changed apartments but did not take the bodyguards with him. They were kept a phone call away, with only one minder at a time knowing his address.

There were a handful of such minders, men and women who each did stints of a few months. It was made plain to them that if Mladić were discovered the suspicion would fall on them. They were presented with gift-wrapped portraits of their children or grandchildren and reminded that Mladić’s associates knew where they lived and went to school. It was the most ruthless and effective threat imaginable, and Mladić’s men used it liberally.

Minders were presented with gift-wrapped portraits of their children or grandchildren by Mladić’s associates

When threats came from the Mladić camp, there was every reason to take them seriously. The men who delivered them had an unquestionable history of violence, and there is evidence that people were killed to ensure that Mladić’s whereabouts remained a secret.

On 5 October 2004, two soldiers, Dragan Jakovljević and Dražen Milovanović, were found shot dead at their posts at the barracks in Topčider, a district of Belgrade. The hasty military investigation that followed concluded that they had got into a fight in which one of them had shot the other and then committed suicide out of remorse.

Amid public uproar, a civilian commission of inquiry was set up but it kept running into a stone wall of hostility from the generals. The crime scene was destroyed by the army. According to the Belgrade lawyer who headed the commission, a colonel in military intelligence approached one member of the commission and said: “You have two nice daughters. Why are you making trouble?”

In the end, the commission concluded that both soldiers had been shot by a third party, without any conclusions on who that third party was. The victims’ parents became convinced that they had been murdered because they had come across evidence that Mladić was being hidden in the labyrinth of underground tunnels beneath the barracks.

Topčider is a virtual underground city, excavated by the Tito regime in the bowels of a hill in central Belgrade, and it is where Milošević took shelter during the Nato bombing in 1999. After the Bosnian conflict, part of the complex was made the headquarters of the 30th Personnel Centre, until it was formally disbanded in March 2002. Some investigators believe it continued to function off the books, as a shadow unit, long after that date.

By mid-2005, Mladić was back on Yuri Gagarin Street in a different apartment and feeling increasingly jumpy. In September that year, investigators later discovered, a policeman making routine inquiries about an incident in the tower block knocked on his door, adding to Mladić’s paranoia. In December 2005, he was moved to Ljuba, a village near the northern Serbian town of Sremska Mitrovica, where one of his network of protectors kept a country cottage. It seems to have been a desperate measure, intended to salvage both Mladić’s sanity and the mental health of his perpetually scared and harassed minders.

The rural interlude was short, probably because Ljuba was too small a community in which to hide at a time when the walls of Mladić’s cloistered life were closing in. That month Djogo was arrested along with eight of the general’s associates. Mladić abruptly dropped the network that had supported him until then, believing it to be compromised. In the dead of night on 4 February 2006, he turned up on the outskirts of Belgrade at the apartment of his brother-in-law, Krsto Jegdić. Pressing the intercom, he announced himself only as “the guy from Bosnia”. Jegdić assumed it was a brother who lived in eastern Bosnia and buzzed him in, only to find Mladić on his doorstep, carrying a backpack and a duffel bag, which contained his constant companions, a Heckler & Koch machine gun and two pistols.

Mladić was clearly nervous and had aged dramatically since Jegdić had last seen him, but that didn’t stop the general from barking orders. He sent Jegdić’s son down to dismiss the driver who had brought him there, and while the teenager was away, Mladić made a comment that implied the boy’s life might be in danger if he was given away.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Mladić graffiti on a wall in Belgrade in 2011. Photograph: Alexa Stankovic/AFP/Getty Images

On this occasion, Mladić’s customary menace backfired. Jegdić’s wife was furious and insisted she would not share her home with a relative who made such threats. Instead, Jegdić offered to drive his unwanted visitor to the house of another Jegdić brother, Miroslav, who lived about 30km away, in the village of Mala Moštanica.

Mala Moštanica is a charming settlement not far from the Sava River, its houses scattered across a few square miles of undulating woodland. Miroslav Jegdić’s house is three unfinished stories of red brick and concrete balconies without railings. There are cherry trees in the back and a grapevine climbing up a rickety improvised trellis on the west wall. Its owner returned to his native Macedonia in 2011 to escape the notoriety of the Mladić connection, and since then the house has deteriorated to an empty shell.

When I visited in 2013, Miroslav’s sister-in-law, Djuka Jegdić, emerged from a house just down the lane to quiz me, hoping my translator and I, notepads in hand, were estate agents from Belgrade. The family had been trying to sell and leave for years.

Djuka denied accounts that she used to cook meals for Mladić and Miroslav and take them across the lane in the evenings, insisting that she had only found out about the general’s presence years later, after his arrest. She conceded later in our conversation that her husband, Vukasin, had told her that Mladić was hiding in Miroslav’s house, but she did not believe him because his mind had become increasingly erratic.

“He started having hallucinations, and I thought this was just another hallucination. He would imagine he saw all sorts of people,” she said. In retrospect, she blamed the pressure of Mladić’s presence and heavy-handed police tactics for his breakdown.

“Once they came and took us both away and we couldn’t warn our 15-year-old son, so he thought we had disappeared, waiting for us in the house on his own,” she said, weeping at the memory. In one incident in April 2006, men from the Security Information Agency (known as the BIA) swept noisily into Mala Moštanica in an early-morning raid. Mladić, looking down through the wooden-slatted shutters of his second-floor window, must have thought his time had finally come, only to see the heavily armed agents cluster around the wrong house, belonging to the wrong Jegdić – Vukasin.

A western investigator who was involved in the hunt said, “The 2006 raid was either monumentally stupid, or deliberate – a way of warning Mladić to move out, while looking busy for the benefit of Carla Del Ponte [the chief prosecutor of war crimes in former Yugoslavia].”

Foul-up or conspiracy, Mladić got away. He slipped out of the back door into the woods to return the next morning. A couple of days later, he left Mala Moštanica for good.

* * *

With every passing month and each successive hiding place, however, the climate in Serbia was growing colder for Mladić. His friends in the army were retiring from the ranks, the public was forgetting about him, worrying more about Serbia’s increasing isolation, and the political currents were turning against him. Đinđić’s former deputy, Boris Tadić, was elected president in June 2004 by weary voters who saw hope in looking west towards the European Union, even at the price of surrendering Serb fugitives to The Hague. In the summer of 2008, new elections put reformists in the ministries and in charge of the security apparatus for the first time.

The resulting euphoria at the ICTY generated hopes that Mladić’s capture would follow soon after. But the optimism was groundless. The general was far more careful and deeply hidden. Even under new management, the BIA persisted with old methods, cranking up the pressure on the Mladić family.

In November 2008, when Mladić’s son Darko’s computer systems firm tried to seal an €8oo,ooo business agreement with a Serbian company, the would-be partner’s factories in the western city of Valjevo were raided and searched for five hours by the police, scaring it away from the deal. Darko’s wife, Biljana, found her career as a software expert in Serbia’s telecommunications corporation starting to suffer, and she was demoted from the Belgrade headquarters to a suburban outpost.

None of the pressure worked, nor was it ever likely to. No family member was going to betray Mladić, especially since they had a protector far more powerful than the BIA: Russia’s Federal Security Bureau (FSB). In Vladimir Putin’s Russia, the spy agency – the successor to Putin’s old employer, the KGB – took a protective interest in Mladić for a variety of reasons. Moscow saw him as a Slav military hero being hunted by western powers trying to deepen their influence in Serbia, an old Russian ally. According to a zero-sum approach to world affairs, the west’s gain in capturing Mladić would be Russia’s strategic lost. Furthermore, the Russians were nervous of what Mladić might reveal about Russian support for the Republika Srpska at the height of ethnic cleansing.

The BIA operatives tracking the Mladić support network found themselves increasingly playing spy versus spy with the FSB. “Every time we got close to getting one of the people in his circle to cooperate, they would go for a long session at the Russian embassy and come out of it with cold feet about talking to us,” recalled Miodrag Rakić, the man entrusted with leading the manhunt during the Tadić presidency. He suspected that Russia was making regular payments to the Mladić family and entourage to relieve the financial pressure on them to give away the general’s whereabouts.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest TV footage of Mladić at a party during his years on the run. Photograph: FTV

Rakić also felt the unmistakable presence of the FSB looking over his shoulder. In 2008, he and a colleague made a clandestine trip to the Hague tribunal to discuss the Mladić case. They flew a roundabout route and Dutch protection officers drove them straight into the tribunal’s underground car park. On his return, however, Rakić received a visit from one of Mladić’s supporters in the security services, warning him that his family would be in peril if he continued to cooperate with the court. Lest there be any doubt over the seriousness of the threat, he recited details of Rakić’s young son’s daily routine.

Shocked at the threat, Rakić angrily denied he was collaborating with the court, insisting he had never even been to The Hague. Without a word, the visitor took a piece of paper and drew a diagram of a conference table. Then he wrote out the name of every person who had attended his meeting in The Hague, indicating precisely where each of them had been sitting. Rakić described it as the most chilling moment of his life. From that moment on, until his death from cancer in 2014, he travelled with a two-man protection team.

There was little doubt in his mind that only the FSB had the sophistication to penetrate the Hague Tribunal so thoroughly. So in 2010, Rakić decided to confront the Russians head-on. At an international conference in Moscow he buttonholed Nikolai Patrushev, Putin’s spymaster, a former head of the FSB, and the secretary of Russia’s Security Council.

“I feel a very cold wind in our face coming from the east,” Rakić told Patrushev. The Russian claimed the protection for Mladić had been sanctioned higher up, clearly meaning Putin himself. In the Kremlin, there was no one higher than Patrushev.

“I will talk to my bosses and I’ll do what I can,” Patrushev offered. Whatever was said or done in Putin’s security cabinet, it clearly made a difference. Russian support for the Mladić network dropped off. Even Moscow was cutting the general loose.

* * *

Mladić’s life as a fugitive ended in the run-down farmhouse of his cousin Branislav, in a northern Serbian village named Lazarevo. Living in a single cluttered room warmed only by a small electric heater, his health took a steep plunge and Branislav found him sprawled on the floor one day after an apparent stroke. But Mladić, still more frightened of capture than of a lonely and squalid death, refused to be taken to hospital. By now his isolation was almost total. He allowed neither his wife nor his son to visit. But despite all these precautions, it was family sentiment that gave him away in the end.

On 6 May, 2008, Darko brought his children, Anastasija and Stefan, to visit the country cousins in Lazarevo for St George’s Day, a significant holiday in Serbia. The party was at another cousin’s house but the family made a detour to Branislav’s home, walking into the central courtyard and standing around with no apparent purpose for 20 minutes before leaving, to the puzzlement of the policemen trailing them. Only after Mladić’s arrest did it become clear what they were doing.

“He was watching them through the window. He wasn’t well. He couldn’t let the children see him but he had the desire to see them,” Tadić said. “Then the Mladić family phoned Lazarevo twice in three days. Why two times? That is what eventually took us to that house.”

At dawn on 26 May 2011, plainclothes officers from a special war crimes unit of the Interior Ministry went to the village to raid the cousins’ houses.

Two of them climbed the stairs in Branislav’s house and found one door hard to open. There was something or someone behind it. When they pushed it open, they found an untidy room that was clearly occupied. They glanced behind the door to see an old man in a black baseball cap standing behind it.

The officers asked for his identity card and the old man handed it over. It had the name Ratko Mladić on it, but the men still could not believe it. This wizened figure looked nothing like the swaggering general they had expected.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Mladić in Belgrade after his 2011 arrest. Photograph: EPA

“Who are you?” they demanded.

“You have found who you’re looking for,” the man replied with a flash of defiance. “I’m Ratko Mladić.” It was the end of 14 years on the run.

Mladić had at one point told his elderly cousin Branislav to shoot him rather than let him be taken alive. He even showed him the gun he was supposed to use. But Branislav was out on the morning of the arrest. Anyway, Branislav told Šaljić, he could never have brought himself to pull the trigger. Neither, as it turned out, could Mladić. His Heckler & Koch was found lying among dirty socks at the bottom of a wardrobe.

President Tadić was doing his morning exercises when he got the call from Saša Vukadinović, the BIA chief who was on an official visit to Washington at the time but was being kept informed by his office.

“I think we got Mladić,” Vukadinović said. The ailing captive was at that moment being driven from Lazarevo to Belgrade in a police car. By now, the president was in a state of excitement. The hunt for Mladić had come to define his presidency. For more than five years he had been under pressure from the rest of the world to make this arrest. If this truly was the missing general, it would be the climatic moment of his career.

He asked if a DNA test could be done, but was informed the results could take days. “What other evidence have you got?” Tadić wanted to know.

“The people who arrested him say it’s him,” Vukadinović replied. “And we’ll send photos when he gets here.”

Little more than an hour later, the mugshots were sent, downloaded, printed on a computer, and rushed into Tadić.

The president took one look at them and instantly declared, “This is Ratko Mladić!”

Šaljić was summoned to the special war crimes court in Belgrade, to see his long-lost client. When he entered Mladić’s cell, he was shocked. “He actually looked blue and his mouth and face were twisted. I wouldn’t have recognised him on the street,” the lawyer recalled. On seeing him, the old man stood up and clung to Šaljić, sobbing.

The next morning, Rakić brought the prisoner breakfast and family photos. “He was terrified. He asked me if I was going to kill him. I said: No – I’m just bringing you breakfast,” Rakić said. He tried to use the moment of vulnerability to ask the captured fugitive about the networks that helped hide him. The prisoner snapped back: “You’ve got me. What do you want with these people? These people sacrificed themselves for me. Let them go.”

Šaljić’s attempts to forestall Mladić’s transfer to The Hague on health grounds failed. Mladic’s trial before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in the Hague began in June 2011 and is still ongoing. However, a Belgrade judge, did grant the defeated general his last request on Serbian soil, to visit the grave of his daughter, Ana, the fragile young woman who had killed herself seven years earlier with his favourite pistol.

Mladić was given 45 minutes at the grave and his minders withdrew a respectful distance, forming a sombre ring around him. “You could see his lips move,” Rakić recalled. “He was speaking to her.”

• This is an extract from The Butcher’s Trail by Julian Borger, published today by Other Press (£17.99). To order a copy for £13.99, go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min. p&p of £1.99.

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An amendment was made for clarity on 22 January 2016. Mladic’s trial in the Hague began in June 2011 and is still ongoing.