In the spring of 1994, year three of the Bosnian war, Ana, the daughter of the Bosnian Serb Lieutenant Colonel General Ratko Mladic, took a pistol from her father’s room in Belgrade – the special silver pistol with which he’d intended to celebrate the birth of his first grandchild – and shot herself in the head. She was 23 years old.
Ana Mladic hadn’t been herself, it was said, since returning from a study trip to Moscow where, people guessed, she had read in a newspaper about her father’s war crimes at Sarajevo. Or had been alerted to them by the cold-shouldering of fellow students. Her suicide was something Ratko Mladic – sentenced to life imprisonment in 2017 for genocide – could never come to terms with, telling himself she’d been murdered by the opposition. One of his last acts before being extradited to the Hague in 2011 was to go and lay flowers on her grave.
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