BRUSSELS, March 6 (Xinhuanet) -- Former Croatian Serb leader and convicted war criminal Milan Babic committed suicide on Sunday in a prison cell in the United Nations (UN) war crimes court in The Hague.

    "At 18:30 hours on Sunday 5 March, Milan Babic, a detained witness, was found dead in his cell at the United Nations Detention Unit in Scheveningen," the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) said in a statement on Monday.

    Scheveningen is a seaside suburb of The Hague.

    "The Detention Unit Medical Officer confirmed Milan Babic's death shortly after his body was found," it said.

    The Dutch authorities were called immediately and they confirmed the cause of death was suicide, the court said.

    The tribunal's president, Judge Fausto Pocar, has ordered an internal inquiry, the statement said.

    Babic, 50, had held a number of high-level positions in the Croatian Serb entity including the presidency. He was the former president of the self-declared Krajina Serb republic that broke away from Croatia after it declared independence from Yugoslavia in 1991.

    In the past two weeks, Babic has been testifying in the trial of Milan Martic, another Croatian Serb leader charged with crimes against non-Serb civilians.

    UN prosecutors considered Babic a major ally of former Yugoslavia President Slobodan Milosevic in a campaign to create a Serb-dominated state on Croatian territory. Babic testified against Milosevic in 2002.

    The ICTY sentenced Babic to 13 years in jail in June 2004 for crimes committed against non-Serb civilians in the Serbian Autonomous Region of Krajina, which later broke away from Croatia.

    The court said that Babic "made inflammatory speeches during public events and in the media which prepared the ground for the Serb population to accept that their goals should be achieved through acts of persecution and amplified the consequences of the campaign of persecutions by allowing it to continue".

    The appeals chamber of the tribunal confirmed the 13 year sentence last July and Babic was then transferred to serve his sentence abroad.

    Babic pleaded guilty in January 2004 to participating in a planto forcibly and permanently remove the non-Serb population from the Krajina Serb republic. The crimes he admitted to include murder, deportation or forcible transfer, unlawful imprisonment ofnon-Serb civilians, and the destruction of their property.

    Besides testifying in the trial of Milosevic, Babic also appeared as a witness in the trial of former Bosnian Serb leader Momcilo Krajisnik. He was also expected to testify against a number of other former Serb officials.

    Babic is not the first UN detainee to commit suicide in the Scheveningen prison. In 1998, another Croatian Serb accused, Slavko Dokmanovic, took his own life. Enditem