Bosnian Serb former general Ratko Mladic arrived in the Netherlands on Tuesday evening, after being extradited by Serbia to the United Nations war crimes tribunal in The Hague, dpa reported.
A plane from Belgrade with Mladic on board landed shortly after 7.30 pm (1730 GMT) at Rotterdam airport. He will be transferred to the war crimes tribunal.
Mladic, 69, had been on the run from justice almost 16 years. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) indicted him in 1995, accusing him of genocide and other war crimes.
Earlier Serbian Justice Minister Snezana Malovic said: "Bringing Mladic to justice is satisfaction for victims and their families and also an act of reconciliation in the region."
The indictment against him has been amended several times, most recently on May 27.
He faces 11 counts of war crimes: two of genocide and the rest of persecution, extermination, murder, deportation, forcible transfer, maltreatment, unjustified attacks on civilians and hostage-taking.
Mladic was at the top of the command chain of the Serb army during the 1992-95 Bosnian war and is being held responsible for atrocities such as the execution of 8,000 Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica.
At the ICTY in The Hague, a court official told the German Press Agency dpa that once Mladic arrived, a date for his first appearance in court would be set "without delay."
Mladic's lawyer Milos Saljic insisted that his client was too ill to face trial, but a government medical team ruled the opposite.
Despite the charges against him, many Serbs still regard Mladic as a true war hero and a defender of his compatriots in Bosnia. A rally in his support in central Belgrade Sunday evening drew several thousand people before erupting into violence.
Around 10,000 gathered in the Bosnian Serb capital of Banjaluka on Tuesday to protest the arrest.
Mladic's political chief during the 1992-95 war, Radovan Karadzic, was arrested in Belgrade in July 2008 and handed over to the ICTY days later.
Karadzic, also accused of genocide and other crimes, has been on trial at the ICTY since 2009. His trial could possibly be merged with Mladic's, local observers in Serbia estimated.
With Mladic's arrest and extradition to ICTY, Serbia has cleared a major hurdle for progress toward European Union membership.
But to fully sideline the troublesome issue of cooperating with ICTY, it needs to find and arrest the final fugitive from ICTY, Goran Hadzic, one of the leaders of the 1991-95 Serb insurgency in Croatia.
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