Ratko Mladic, wanted for Europe's worst massacre of civilians since World War II, has been arrested in Serbia.

Mladic, 69, was caught in a dawn arrest at a relative's home in a tiny Serbian village after a 16 year hunt.

Foremost among the horrors he's charged with is the July 1995 slaughter of up to 8,000 Muslim men and boys in the Bosnian town of Srebrenica.

The area was supposed to be a safe zone guarded by Dutch peacekeepers.

Mladic had two pistols when he was arrested but offered no resistance, and he appeared shrunken, bald and pale, Serbian officials and media said.

A bullnecked field commander with narrow, piercing blue eyes, Mladic seized the town of Srebrenica and was seen handing candy to Muslim children in the town's square.

He assured them everything would be fine and patted one boy on the head. Hours later, his men began days of killing, rape and torture.

War crimes tribunal judge Fouad Riad said during Mladic's 1995 indictment in absentia that the court had seen evidence of "unimaginable savagery: thousands of men executed and buried in mass graves, hundreds of men buried alive, men and women mutilated and slaughtered, children killed before their mothers' eyes, a grandfather forced to eat the liver of his own grandson."

"These are truly scenes from hell, written on the darkest pages of human history," he said.

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