Former Serbian military commander Ratko Mladic has arrived in The Hague after Serbia's war crimes court earlier rejected an appeal against his extradition
Serbia's justice minister Snezana Malovic signed an extradition order and confirmed the transfer was underway.
A Serbian government plane carrying Ratko Mladic landed in the Netherlands shortly after 6.30pm Irish time. Dutch television showed footage of an airplane landing at Rotterdam The Hague airport.
"Ratko Mladic has been extradited to The Hague tribunal this afternoon," she said at a press conference in Belgrade today.
Ms Malovic said the order is proof that "we are sticking with our pledges and Serbia is sincerely committed to completing cooperation with The Hague Tribunal."
Mladic, who was arrested on May 26, faces charges of genocide at the United Nations War Crimes Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague.
Before Ms Malovic's announcement, military jeeps were shown on state television station RTS leaving the Belgrade courthouse where Mladic's appeal was heard and later entering the city's airport.
The accused war criminal's last day in Serbia began with a police-escorted visit to the Belgrade grave of his daughter Ana, who took her own life in 1994.
Mladic is charged with genocide in the 43-month siege of Sarajevo and the massacre of 8,000 Muslims in Srebrenica during the 1992-95 Bosnian War.
The court received the Mladic appeal this morning after his cemetery visit and rejected it within hours. His lawyer said he had new medical evidence.
During a prison visit yesterday, Mladic met his five-year old grandson, possibly for the first time, and his 10-year-old granddaughter. His wife and son were expected to visit him again this afternoon.
Mladic's lawyer and family say the 69-year-old, who was captured alone in a cousin's farmhouse, is mentally unstable and too sick to be extradited to the tribunal.
Yet he was able to elude justice for 16 years, a fact that in recent years held back Serbia's progress in achieving membership in the European Union as Brussels has insisted on his capture and transfer to the international court.
Mladic's arrest has also highlighted continued deep ethnic divisions in Bosnia, where he fought to create a separate Serb entity. As a result of the war, a Serb Republic exists as one of two halves under a weak central Bosnian government.
Around 10,000 Bosnian Serbs pledged support for their wartime commander in the Serb Republic's capital Banja Luka, an affront to Muslims elsewhere in Bosnia who view the general as a brutal murderer.
Buses arrived from across the Serb Republic, many filled with his former soldiers bearing his photo. "There are more Mladics in Serbia, they grow and will continue where he stopped," Srdjan Nogo of the ultra-nationalist organisation Srpske Dveri from Belgrade told the crowd.
Reuters