How the ‘Hanging Woman’ revealed truth of Bosnia’s mass killer

In 1996, our writer identified the suicide victim whose death symbolised the cruelty of Ratko Mladic. As his life sentence is upheld, she recalls a meeting with Ferida Osmanovic's children

In July 1995, a photograph made newspaper front pages around the world. It showed a woman in a white skirt and red cardigan hanging from a tree in a wood outside Srebrenica in eastern Bosnia. The caption read: The Hanging Woman".

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, and this one said everything about the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina.