The 62-year-old Dragomir Milosevic pleaded not guilty to all seven counts of his indictment. Milosevic was indicted on the basis of individual and command responsibility with the terrorising of civilians, murder and other inhumane acts and attacks on civilians as crimes against humanity and violations of the laws and customs of war.
After he spent 6.5 years in hiding, on December 3 Milosevic surrendered to the authorities in Belgrade and was transferred to The Hague on the same day.
In August 1994, Milosevic, born in Ub in Serbia, took over command of the Sarajevo-Romanija Corps of the Republika Srpska Army which kept Sarajevo under siege.
He is charged with conducting, from August 1994 to November 1995, a coordinated campaign of cannon and sniper attacks on Sarajevo residents.
The indictment against him was issued on April 24, 1998, with a warrant for his arrest, and it was unsealed on December 20, 1998.
The indictment initially also covered Milosevic's predecessor at the post of corps commander, General Stanislav Galic, but after Galic was arrested by the Stabilisation Force in Bosnia on December 20, 1999, and transferred to The Hague, it was decided that the two generals should be tried separately.
On December 5, 2003 Galic was found guilty and sentenced to 20 years in prison pending appeal.
The verdict caused division among members of the trial chamber, as one of the judges believed that Galic should have been sentenced to 10 years in prison because the prosecution failed to provide convincing evidence.
The verdict met with criticism in Bosnia-Herzegovina because it was considered to be too mild considering the victims of the 3.5-year siege of the city, during which some 10,000 people were killed.