Several thousand Bosnian Serbs paid tribute on Tuesday to former military commander and convicted war criminal Ratko Mladic, who died while serving a life sentence for genocide.
Mladic died on Thursday at the age of 84 in The Hague, where he was convicted of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity during the Bosnian war, including for his role in the Srebrenica massacre, Europe's worst act of bloodshed since World War II.
Television images showed people gathered at the main square in central Banja Luka, the capital of Bosnia's Serb entity, and them marching on the city's principal boulevard holding up a banner proclaiming: "Commander, thank you for everything."
Some lit smoke flares and waved flags of the Serb entity and then lit candles at a monument dedicated to Serb soldiers killed during the war and lined up to write messages in a condolence book.
EU Enlargement Commissioner Marta Kos on Monday criticised Serbia's plans to bury Mladic with state honours.
Mladic's conviction for wartime killings as the former Yugoslavia descended into carnage after the fall of communism led the international press to dub him the "Butcher of Bosnia".
The 1992-1995 war left around 100,000 people dead and 2.2 million displaced.
Mladic was the military face of a brutal trio, led on the political side by ex-Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic and former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic.
