LONDON – Former leader of the Serbs in Bosnia Radovan Karadzic was secretly transferred from Holland to his final prison in England: a maximum security prison on the Isle of Wight. The 75-year-old “executioner of Srebrenica and Sarajevo”, as he was nicknamed for crimes committed during the civil war in the former Yugoslavia, received a life sentence with no possibility of release for “war crimes” and “genocide”, including the massacre of 8,000 Bosnian Muslims.
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British authorities announced this morning that Karadzic arrived in London on Thursday and from there he was escorted to the Isle of Wight, in the English Channel opposite the Port of Southampton, a famous venue for the rock music festival which there it was held at the end of the sixties (then restored from 2002 onwards) and celebrated by the well-known song Wight is Wight by Michel Delpech, entitled The Isle of Wight in the Italian version of Dik Dik.
Former Yugoslavia, Karadzic sentenced to life imprisonment for Srebrenica genocide and other war crimes
But it is also the home of Her Majesty Prison Isle of Wight, better known by its old name, Parkhurst, a prison where some of England’s worst criminals have been held, such as the Kray twins, two leaders of organized crime, the ripper of the Yorkshire Peter Sutcliffe and serial killer Ian Brady. She was chosen for Karadzic because she has a very low number of Islamic inmates: it was feared that the Bosnian war criminal could be the object of revenge behind bars by Muslim prisoners. Today most of the inmates on the Isle of Wight are sex offenders, on average over the age of fifty.
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by ANDREA TARQUINI
A fugitive in Bosnia from 1996 to 2008, Karadzic was arrested in Belgrade where he worked as a doctor under a false name and tried in 2016 by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, established by the United Nations in The Hague. As part of an agreement with the UN, the UK agreed to serve his sentence here, after his initial imprisonment in the Netherlands where the trial took place. Upon arriving in London, his lawyer stated that the former Bosnian president is in poor health and is receiving various medicines. “IS one of the few convicted of genocide, ”commented the British Foreign Minister Dominic Raab. “IS responsible for the massacre of thousands of men, women and children in Srebrenica and the siege of Sarajevo. It took thirty years but it is finally paying for its crimes ”. As a young lawyer, Raab worked at the court in The Hague which later sentenced Karadzic.
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