Investigators at the UN’s war crimes court in The Hague are scrambling to seal security breaches amid fears other inmates will “do a Praljak”, copying the Bosnian Croat warlord who dramatically killed himself with cyanide last week.
Slobodan Praljak’s suicide, carried out in the dock and televised around the world, threatens to make a mockery of the court’s vaunted security procedures.
With Dutch police opening their own investigation, the tribunal has appointed Gambia’s chief justice Hassan Jallow to find out how Praljak, 72, obtained the bottle of potassium cyanide that Netherlands prosecutors said killed him.
The investigation is likely to start with the most glaring breach – the lack of any guard placed close enough to Praljak to snatch the cyanide from his grasp.
Most Hague trials have a blue-uniformed guard in the dock beside defendants: two were deployed to flank the famously irascible Bosnian Serb general Ratko Mladic last month when judges convicted him of genocide for orchestrating the Srebrenica massacre.
Yet no guard was beside Praljak, who was sentenced to 20 years for a litany of crimes against Muslims during the Bosnian war, when he appeared in the dock along with four fellow Bosnian Croat defendants to hear appeals against hefty sentences rejected.
Just two security staff bookended the line of defendants in what was billed as the final act of the court before it closes its doors at the end of this month, and neither noticed the bottle Praljak held in front of him in his meaty hands.
After hearing his 20-year sentence confirmed by appeal judges, the bearded warlord declared “Slobodan Praljak is not a war criminal, I reject your judgment with contempt,” and thrust the contents of the bottle into his mouth.
Only when Praljak, tottering, his eyes glazed, slumped to his seat and announced “I have taken poison” did the judges react.
“There were normally two guards behind the accused … not this time,” said a Croatian official, who would not be named because they are not authorised to talk to the media. “The Croatian press says that perhaps the last day of the Tribunal contributed to the relaxing of rules.”
Investigators will want to know also how Praljak got the poison into the dock despite rules mandating strip searches and X-rays for defendants entering and leaving the court complex. Given the lethality of even small doses of cyanide, officials may count themselves lucky he used it only on himself.
Of concern to investigators is whether other convicts still awaiting appeals verdicts, by a successor court due to start work next month, may be tempted to take similar drastic action.
