Lawyers for Bosnian Serb ex-army chief Ratko Mladic sought yesterday a six-month adjournment of his war crimes trial at the International Criminal Court, two days before the hearing was due to open.

Mr Mladic, 70, stands accused of carrying out a brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing and the massacre of Muslims at Srebrenica, Europe’s worst atrocity since Nazi rule.

He has been indicted on 11 counts of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity for his role in the Balkan country’s 1992-95 war which left 100,000 people dead and 2.2 million homeless.

But ahead of the trial due to open in The Hague tomorrow, his lawyers said they have not been given enough time to examine certain documents and that they required more time to prepare his defence.

“The defence respectfully requests an adjournment and continuance of trial for six months, or in the alternative, that the chamber bar the prosecution from utilising at trial any exhibit or witness that was the subject of late disclosure,” lawyers Branko Lukic and Miodrag Stojanovic said in a statement.

On Friday, the defence had objected to judge Alphonse Orie, saying he was not impartial as he had previously sentenced several of Mr Mladic’s subordinates.

Dubbed the “Butcher of Bosnia”, Mr Mladic is accused over the slaughter at Srebrenica where almost 8,000 Muslim men and boys were systematically murdered in July 1995.

Prosecutors also hold him responsible for the 44-month siege of Sarajevo where his forces waged a “terror campaign” of sniping and shelling that left 10,000 civilians dead.

It was in pursuit of a “Greater Serbia” that Mr Mladic allegedly ordered his troops to “cleanse” Bosnian towns, driving out Croats, Muslims and other non-Serb residents.

After the war, Mr Mladic continued his military career but went into hiding in 2000 after then Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic’s government fell.

An indicted war criminal, he spent 16 years on the run until May 2011 when he was found and arrested at a relative’s house in Lazarevo, northeastern Serbia and flown to a prison in The Hague a few days later.