The court said there was no evidence that Mandic, a minister under then Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, was involved in war crimes against non-Serbs.

He had been charged with leading an attack by Bosnian Serb police and paramilitary units on a police training centre in Sarajevo in April 1992, where non-Serbs were held and tortured.

He was also accused of running three notorious detention camps, two near Sarajevo and one in the eastern town of Foca, where civilians were tortured or sent to forced labor at the front lines, often to their death.

Mandic's boss Karadzic is still on the run from the United Nations war crimes tribunal in The Hague, that has indicted him twice for genocide.

Reuters