A Bosnian court on Friday convicted a former ethnic Serb officer of genocide for his role in the 1995 Srebrenica massacre of Muslims, overturning a myth that he had heroically refused to join the operation.
Srecko Acimovic, who has long claimed to be one of few Serb soldiers to disobey his superiors during the slaughter in Srebrenica, was handed nine years in prison for in fact participating in the massacre.
Acimovic, 53, "helped commit a joint criminal enterprise... consisting of the partial extermination of a religious and ethnic group. He has thus committed the act of genocide," Judge Stanisa Gluhajic said while delivering the verdict before a Sarajevo court.
Serb troops executed more than 8,000 Muslim men and teenagers in Srebrenica, an eastern enclave of Muslims, during the final year of Bosnia's devastating inter-communal war.
According to the verdict, Acimovic "carried out an order" to secure trucks to transport 818 prisoners gathered in a school gymnasium to the place of their execution, a quarry near the village of Kozluk 70 km north of Srebrenica.
Prosecutors said he "knowingly and for years built himself the reputation of a hero".
After the end of the war, which claimed 100,000 lives, local press hailed Acimovic as "a good man in the time of great evil."
He told a similar story during depositions in several war crimes trials before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague.
Acimovic claimed he refused an order of his superiors to form a prisoner execution squad.
But in December 2015, he was indicted by local prosecutors.
The worst atrocity in Europe since World War II, the Srebrenica massacre still casts a shadow over ethnically-divided Bosnia.
To date, nearly 6,900 victims of the massacre have been identified in more than 80 mass graves, while the families of others are still searching for remains.