Radovan Karadzic, the former Bosnian Serb leader charged with war crimes, will base his defence on the argument that no genocide occurred at Srebrenica, the site of arguably Europe’s worst massacre since the second world war.

Goran Petronijevic, Mr Karadzic’s chief legal adviser, said his client would argue that the killings were not genocide – a direct ­challenge to the Yugoslavia Tribunal’s previous rulings that forces belonging to Mr Karadzic’s ethnic Serb breakaway state killed about 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys in July 1995.