Answering a question by the accused, who is a former Yugoslav and Serbian president, the witness said that she saw Osama bin Laden, the al-Qaida leader, in Sarajevo in early 1994, when she was a correspondent for The Sunday Times from the Bosnian capital.
She said that while she was waiting for the then Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic to give her an interview in a presidency building in Sarajevo, "an important Arab" jumped the queue.
This was Osama bin Laden, although I did not recognise him then but I later heard it indirectly from a Der Spiegel correspondent, the defence witness said.
This has remained impressed in my memory, particularly after September 11, Prentice said.
She also said that the responsibility for the massacre of Sarajevans on the Markale open-air market on 5 February 1994 should be ascribed to the government of Bosnia-Herzegovina as the civilians were killed in an explosion of a planted explosive device under a stand and not in the shelling launched from Serb positions.
Her statement was in accordance with claims by Serb hardliners that the Muslim-led Bosnian government staged the massacre so as to incite the international community to punish the Serb side.
She claimed that Sarajevo was not under Serb siege, and to corroborate her statement she said that she could freely move from Sarajevo to Pale, the Serb stronghold in 1994.
Prosecutor Geoffrey Nice did not want at all to discuss her statements on Osama bin Laden and the Markale market, saying that those were claims with no proof.
During the cross-examination, he, however, read excerpts from her articles on Bosnian Serb-run camps in Omarska and Keraterm in 1993 and the detention of civilians, and from her report from Pristina in which she said that the Serb police and paramilitary units had been present on every corner and that the smell of terror could be felt.
In her book on Kosovo she writes that the fierce ethnic cleansing of Albanians had lasted since the start of 1999 and was intensified with NATO air strikes.
These statements were diametrally opposite to what she said on Friday morning when she testified as the defence witness about events in Kosovo.