Plavsic, known as the "Iron Lady", has served two-thirds of her sentence and will be eligible for parole in October under laws in Sweden, where she is being detained.

In 2003, she was convicted of the persecution of Croats and Bosnian Muslims in the Bosnian War, which raged from 1992 to 1995. Plavsic had pleaded guilty to "inviting paramilitaries from Serbia to assist Bosnian Serb forces in effecting ethnic separation by force" on political, racial and religious grounds.

The court had dropped charges of genocide, extermination and murder in return for her guilty plea. The 79-year-old is the highest ranking official from the former Yugoslavia to have acknowledged ordering atrocities perpetrated in the 1990 wars that sprang from the breakup of the Yugoslav federation.

Prior to the charges being dropped against her, Plavsic had been one of three Bosnian Serb leaders, including Radovan Karadzic, due to face trial in October on multiple counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity, such as those committed in the town of Srebrenica in Bosnia-Herzegovina in July 1995.

Outrage over release

An estimated 8,000 Muslim men and boys were massacred in Srebrenica by members of the Bosnian Serb army under the command of Ratko Mladic, an indicted war criminal, as well as irregular Serbian units.

Muslim victims of the Bosnian War were outraged Tuesday by the decision taken by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia to release Plavsic.

"How can we explain this to children whose parents had been killed (in Serb-run) camps) - children who remember their parents only from photos? news agency AFP quoted Murat Tahirovic, the head of an association of Muslim and Croat war camp prisoners, as asking.

Munira Subasic, the head of an association of survivors of the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, said the only explanation for Plavsic's release was that "the world supports crime and criminals."

"How is it possible that Plavsic has the right to freedom and I do not have the right to find and bury the bones of my son 14 years after he was brutally killed?" she asked.

dfm/AFP/Reuters

Editor:Susan Houlton