A Croatian general considered to be one the UN war crimes tribunal's most sought-after suspects has been arrested in a luxury restaurant in the Canary Islands after more than four years on the run.

General Ante Golovina, 50, was arrested as he dined near Tenerife last night and will soon be transferred from Spanish custody to a detention unit in The Hague.

"Ante Gotovina was arrested last night in Spain. He’s finally now in detention," announced Carla Del Ponte, the Tribunal's chief prosecutor.

Croatia has been under intense pressure from the European Union to arrest General Gotovina and turn him over to the war crimes tribunal for trial on charges that he masterminded the killing of at least 150 Serbs and the expulsion of some 150,000 others from eastern Croatia during the Yugoslav war of the early 1990s.

The retired general, one of the three most-wanted war crimes fugitives from the Balkan conflict, is regarded as a hero by many in Croatia, and the government’s failure to arrest him had blocked Croatia’s EU membership talks for years. EU negotiations finally began in October, after Ms Del Ponte said the country was cooperating with the tribunal.

Spain’s Interior Ministry said that General Gotovina was arrested by special policemen Wednesday in a luxury hotel-restaurant south of Tenerife. The arrest was swift and without major incidents, the ministry statement said.

The war crimes suspect was carrying a false Croatian passport under the name of Kristian Horvat - Christian Croat.

Ivo Sanader, the Croatian Prime Minister, welcomed the arrest, saying that no-one was exempt from the rule of law and that the retired general should stand trial before the UN tribunal. The general's capture demonstrates that "the rule of law has no alternative", Mr Sanader said during a Cabinet meeting.

Mr Gotovina has been at large since the tribunal accused him in 2001 of the wartime atrocities during the 1995 offensive code-named "Operation Storm" against the Croatian Serb stronghold of Knin. Croatian officials said last week that the former French Foreign Legionnaire was believed to have fled the country, possibly to South Africa or South America.

The Hague indictment alleges that General Gotovina "participated in a joint criminal enterprise, the common purpose of which was the forcible and permanent removal of the (Croatian) Serb population ... including by the plunder, damage or outright destruction of property of the Serb population, so as to discourage or prevent members of that population from returning to their homes and resuming habitation".

News of the arrest prompted a spontaneous round of applause at a NATO foreign ministers meeting in Brussels. The NATO Secretary-General, Jaap De Hoop Scheffer, said: "The arrest of Gotovina is good news for the world. ... I think it’s also good news for Croatia."

It also raised hopes that the other two top war crimes suspects, the former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic and his military commander, General Ratko Mladic, would soon be captured as well. "I’m expecting now Mladic and Karadzic," Ms Del Ponte said in Belgrade.

The two, who are believed to be hiding in Serbia or in the Serb-controlled half of Bosnia, were charged by the tribunal for allegedly orchestrating the 1995 massacre of 8,000 Muslim boys and men from Srebrenica - Europe’s worst carnage since World War II - and for laying a three-year siege to the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo.

Ms Del Ponte said that she was angry and disappointed by Serbia’s failure to arrest the two as she prepared a key report on whether the Balkan country was co-operating with her tribunal. If the Security Council rules later this month that Serbia is not complying with its international obligations, the troubled Balkan country could face renewed political and economic sanctions and isolation.

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