Ratko Mladic taunted the victims of the Bosnian war
The turning point came as Ratko Mladic put aside his evident physical frailty to taunt victims of the Bosnian war in the public gallery and to regain the pugnacity and arrogance of the notorious "butcher of Srebrenica".
The former Bosnian Serb commander, 69, began his first appearance on charges of genocide by complaining that his illnesses, his right arm hung dangling after a stroke, meant he had not read the charges against him.
But as Alphons Orie, the presiding judge, read out the long list of war crimes on which he is charged, Mladic dropped the persona of a sick old man and turned to taunt the mothers of Bosnian Muslims killed in the Srebrenica massacre.
Putting his shoulders back and sticking out his chin, Mladic regained something of the bulldog swagger and militaristic poise of the Colonel General accused of killing 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica.
The key moment came as he caught the eye of Kada Hotic, the sobbing mother of a boy killed by his Bosnian Serb troops in July 1995 as the judge charged him with genocide for the massacre, the first act of genocide on European soil since the Second World War....