The International Criminal Court is preparing to receive its first prisoner, a Congolese warlord accused of ordering the killing of nine Bangladeshi peacekeepers last year, according to sources at the court.

Thomas Lubanga, the leader of the Union of Congolese Patriots (UPC), was arrested in Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly Zaire), last March, weeks after the peacekeepers were killed in the lawless Ituri region in the east of the country.

Mr Lubanga is accused of directing the attack despite having moved to the capital to run the political wing of his militia, a force made up of Hema tribesman that is notorious for its use of child soldiers.

Sources at the UN-run court said today that Lubanga, who had been under house arrest, was handed over by the Congolese authorities this morning and was now on his way to The Hague, where he will be tried for war crimes.

"He is in the air," a spokesman for the court told Times Online, adding that Mr Lubanga was expected to arrive in the Netherlands around midnight.

A statement from the French Foreign Ministry said that its forces had helped with the transfer, which comes just days before Kofi Annan, the UN Secretary General, is expected in Kinshasa to review the UN mission in the country.

Nearly 17,000 UN peacekeepers are currently deployed in Congo as it prepares to hold its first national democratic elections for four decades in June.

The French Government called the Lubanga indictment an "important step in the fight against impunity, which has reigned too long in the Great Lakes region [of eastern Africa]".

Although five Ugandan warlords have already been indicted by the ICC, a controversial body set up in 2002 as the world's first standing court to prosecute war crimes, Mr Lubanga is the first suspect to be brought into custody.

He emerged as one of the most dangerous militia leaders in Congo's five-year war that cost the lives of an estimated four million people from 1998 to 2003. Fierce fighting, rape, massacres and battles over gold sucked the armies of six nations into the former Belgian colony.

Mr Lubanga, described as a tall extrovert who surrounded himself with a bodyguard of boy soldiers, was one of the key figures in tribal fighting between Hema and Lendu militias in the Ituri region that is thought to have caused more than 50,000 deaths. Human rights groups accuse the UPC of killing more than 800 unarmed civilians in attacks on mining towns.

But it was planned ambush of the Bangladeshi soldiers last year, one of the worst days in UN peacekeeping history, that made him an internationally wanted suspect. In the days after the attack, UN forces killed 60 suspected militia fighters and arrested three other warlords in the region.

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