The notorious Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic is to serve the rest of his sentence for war crimes in a British jail, Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab has announced.

Karadzic, 75, will be transferred to a UK prison from the UN detention centre in the Netherlands, where he has been held following his conviction for genocide and crimes against humanity.

In 2016, he was sentenced by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague to serve 40 years, later increased to life.

He was held responsible for the 1995 massacre killing of more than 7,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica – regarded as one of the worst atrocities committed in Europe since the Second World War.

Following the end of the Bosnian war, Karadzic evaded justice for over a decade before he was finally arrested in 2008 in the Serbian capital Belgrade – where he was working as an doctor of alternative medicine under an assumed name.

In a statement, Mr Raab said: “Radovan Karadzic is one of the few people to have been found guilty of genocide.

“He was responsible for the massacre of men, women and children at the Srebrenica genocide and helped prosecute the siege of Sarajevo with its remorseless attacks on civilians.

“We should take pride in the fact that, from UK support to secure his arrest, to the prison cell he now faces, Britain has supported the 30 year pursuit of justice for these heinous crimes.”

Speaking later, Mr Raab described Srebrenica as “the darkest moment in European history since the Holocaust”.

He said: “I think we have got a moral duty and I think we have a sense of national purpose in trying to hold to account the perpetrators of the very worst crimes.

“If we want to deter these kind of crimes from happening, if we want to give justice to the many thousands of victims, I think it is right we do our bit.”