Croatian war crimes suspect Ante Gotovina was flown to the UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague, Netherlands, today, the Defence Ministry said.

Gotovina, who was arrested on Wednesday in Spain’s Canary Islands, was taken from a prison outside Madrid at about 8am (7am Irish time) and taken to a military base near the capital, a ministry spokeswoman said.

He was flown in an armed forces plane to Rotterdam airport, in the Netherlands, from where he was to be driven to The Hague, said the spokeswoman, speaking on the customary condition of anonymity.

Gotovina, a retired Croatian army general, was indicted by the UN tribunal in connection with the killings of at least 150 Serbs by troops under his command and for the expulsion of about 150,000 others during Croatia’s 1991-95 war.

Croatia’s failure to track down Gotovina had been a key obstacle to his country’s bid to start membership talks with the European Union. Croatia insisted it was not sheltering Gotovina, and the EU decided in October to move ahead with membership talks.

Gotovina was arrested while dining at a hotel in Tenerife in the Canary Islands after Spanish police were tipped off by Interpol. He was found to be travelling on a false passport with entry and exit stamps from around the world, Spanish officials said.

Spanish police had learned that Gotovina spent two or three days in the Canary Islands in October and after that began to focus on the archipelago off West Africa in their efforts to track him down, Interior Minister Jose Antonio Alonso said on Friday.

Alonso said that police who arrested Gotovina – who has been on the run since the court indicted him in 2001 – found cash, a portable computer and two false passports in his hotel room.

The passport Gotovina was travelling on in the Canary Islands had entry and exit stamps from Tahiti, Argentina, China, Chile, Russia, the Czech Republic and, as recently as November 25, from the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius, Alonso said.