Goran Hadzic, the last major Serb war crimes fugitive to be caught, made a second appearance at the U.N.'s Yugoslavia tribunal in The Hague Wednesday when he pleaded not guilty to war crimes charges.
Hadzic, 52, was indicted for committing crimes against humanity in Croatia during the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s.
Here are some details about him:
LIFE DETAILS:
* Hadzic was born in September 1958 in Croatia and worked as a warehouseman before the outbreak of war there.
* In the spring of 1990, Hadzic was elected to the council at Vukovar and later joined the Serbian Democratic Party.
* Hadzic was elected president of the self-declared "Republic of Serbian Krajina" in Croatia in September 1991 and remained in that position until December 1993.
* Hadzic fled from his house in Novi Sad, 80 km (50 miles) northwest of Belgrade, in 2004 to avoid arrest after the international indictment. He was also wanted in neighboring Croatia for genocide.
* The house was searched again in 2009.
* He was arrested on July 20 on a forest road in the Fruska Gora national park region about 65 km (40 miles) north of Belgrade.
* He was extradited to The Hague on July 22, in a symbolic moment for the once-pariah Balkan nation's European future.
CHARGES:
* The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia indicted Hadzic in July 2004 on 14 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity during the 1991-1995 conflict.
-- He is charged with a number of crimes committed in eastern Slavonia. These include:
-- Murder and persecution of Croat and other non-Serb civilians including 264 hospital patients in Vukovar in 1991.
-- Prolonged imprisonment of civilians in jails where torture, beatings and killing were not uncommon;
* Forcible transfer of tens of thousands of non-Serbs from across the area under his control to make it part of a new Serb-dominated state.
Sources Reuters/ICTY: