Lawyers defending former Serb military chief Ratko Mladic on Tuesday asked war crimes judges to acquit him, saying their client considered every life lost during Bosnia's bloody war "a tragedy".
Once dubbed "the Butcher of Bosnia", Mladic, 74, has denied 11 charges including two of genocide, as well as war crimes and crimes against humanity arising from the cruel 1992-95 Bosnian conflict.
"General Mladic wishes me to specify that he and the defence team considers every life lost in the war, every Bosniak, Serb, Croat, Roma, Albanian, every man, woman and child, a tragedy," Dragan Ivetic told the Hague-based Yugoslav war crimes court.
But presiding Judge Alphons Orie quickly slapped down a request for one minute's silence from Mladic, who sat nodding in agreement in the dock as his lawyer read a closing statement.
Ivetic said he hoped an acquittal would send a "strong and enduring message as to the legacy" of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) "as one of justice".
Prosecutors "failed to meet the... burden of proof... to any of the counts and charges of the indictment", Ivetic added, finishing the defence's case in a trial that opened in May 2012.
Mladic's case is the last before the UN's ICTY which closes next year, and a verdict is expected sometime before late November 2017.
Prosecutors urged the judges last week to jail Mladic for life, accusing him of leading a ruthless campaign of ethnic cleansing during the 1990s Balkan wars to create a Greater Serbia.
"The time has come for General Mladic to be held accountable for those crimes against each of his victims and the communities he destroyed," prosecutor Alan Tieger told the tribunal.
Mladic is notably accused of being behind the punishing 44-month siege of the Bosnian capital Sarajevo, which claimed an estimated 10,000 lives in a relentless campaign of shelling and sniping.
He is also charged with genocide for his role in the 1995 killing of almost 8,000 Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica, Europe's worst bloodshed since World War II.
More than 100,000 people died and 2.2 million others were left homeless during the Bosnian war, one of several conflicts which erupted in the death throes of the former Yugoslavia.
After living openly in Serbia despite an international arrest warrant against him, Mladic was finally captured in 2011 after 16 years on the run and transferred to a UN detention centre in The Hague.
