| Title | War Criminal Drinks Poison at The Hague, Live Streamed to the World | |
| Date | Sunday December 03 2017, @10:27AM | |
| Author | Fnord666 | |
| Topic | ||
| from the does-this-smell-like-almonds? dept. | ||
After hearing his guilty sentence upheld, convicted war criminal Slobodan Praljak took out a small bottle of poison and drank it. The act of defiance was streamed live to viewers around the world. Praljak died a few hours later:
It happened in the span of a few confused minutes.
Moments after hearing that his 20-year sentence for war crimes had been upheld, Slobodan Praljak defied the admonitions of his judges, declared his innocence a final time — and with eyes wide, as if shocked himself at what he was doing, put a tiny glass to his lips and gulped deeply. "I just drank poison," he exclaimed after lowering the glass. And the presiding judge asked for the curtains to be closed.
The end came quickly. Praljak died within hours Wednesday. But as Dutch authorities open their investigation into the incident at the international criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, one difficult question promises to persist much longer: How exactly did the former Bosnian Croat general manage to commit suicide in a high-security courtroom in The Hague, Netherlands, and in front of viewers streaming the video live around the world?
There is reason — besides his swift death — to believe Praljak's declaration that he had indeed taken poison.
"There was a preliminary test of the substance in the container and all I can say for now is that there was a chemical substance in that container that can cause death," Dutch prosecutor Marilyn Fikenscher told The Associated Press. That said, the official cause of death will have to wait until an autopsy is completed.
Slobodan Praljak. The poison is thought to have been cyanide.
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printed from SoylentNews, War Criminal Drinks Poison at The Hague, Live Streamed to the World on 2024-04-27 10:05:40