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Serbian President Boris Tadic: "Today we closed one chapter of our recent history"
Gen Mladic is accused over the massacre of at least 7,500 Bosnian Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica in 1995.
He was the most prominent Bosnian war crimes suspect at large since the arrest of Radovan Karadzic in 2008.
President Tadic said work was under way to extradite Gen Mladic to the international war crimes tribunal in The Hague, and it later emerged that that a plane carrying the suspect had taken off from Belgrade for the Dutch city.
The detention, the Serbian leader said, had closed one chapter in Serbian history, bringing the country and the region closer to reconciliation.
Analysis 
It is hard to overstate the importance of this arrest here in Serbia. Many people feel the destiny of their country was held hostage by Ratko Mladic. Their hopes of joining the EU were ruled out by Brussels while Mladic was at large.
I asked President Tadic if it was a coincidence that he was arrested while the EU's foreign affairs chief, Catherine Ashton, was in Belgrade. He said the country had never calculated its search for Mladic - it was always determined to catch him.
There is still an ultra-nationalist fringe here who see Mladic as a hero - they say he only ever defended Serb interests. But the new, emerging generation in Serbia seem to be tired of the past and its wars - they want to leave that behind and move forward to the future.
I asked President Tadic if it was a coincidence that he was arrested while the EU's foreign affairs chief, Catherine Ashton, was in Belgrade. He said the country had never calculated its search for Mladic - it was always determined to catch him.
There is still an ultra-nationalist fringe here who see Mladic as a hero - they say he only ever defended Serb interests. But the new, emerging generation in Serbia seem to be tired of the past and its wars - they want to leave that behind and move forward to the future.
It had also opened the doors to membership of the European Union, he added.
A spokeswoman for families of Srebrenica victims, Hajra Catic, told AFP news agency: "After 16 years of waiting, for us, the victims' families, this is a relief."Nato chief Anders Fogh Rasmussen hailed the arrest, saying it finally offered "a chance for justice to be done", while Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt said Serbia's EU prospects were "now brighter than ever".The road to capture
- 1995: Gen Mladic indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, accused of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes
- October 2000: Former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic ousted and arrested the following year; Gen Mladic, believed to be living in Serbia, disappears from view
- April 2005: Serbian Foreign Minister Vuk Draskovic says Serbian security agents knew Gen Mladic's whereabouts; the intelligence agency describes the allegations as "ridiculous"
- February 2006: Chief UN prosecutor demands Serbia step up the hunt for Gen Mladic and says the failure to arrest him will harm Serbia's EU membership chances
- July 2008: Gen Mladic's mentor, Bosnian Serb former political leader Radovan Karadzic, captured
- October 2010: Serbia offers 10m euros (£8.7m) for information leading to Gen Mladic's capture and arrest
Gen Mladic was said by Serbian media to have been arrested in Vojvodina, a northern province of Serbia, in the early hours of Thursday morning.
President Tadic would only confirm he had been arrested "on Serbian soil", adding that details of the arrest would be released once an investigation had been completed.Gen Mladic had reportedly been using the assumed name Milorad Komodic.
Serbian security sources told AFP that three special units had descended on a house in the village of Lazarevo, around 80km (50 miles) south-west of Belgrade and close to the Romanian border.
The house was owned by a relative of Gen Mladic and had been under surveillance for the past two weeks, one of the sources added.
Gen Mladic was indicted by the UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague in 1995 for genocide over the killings that July at Srebrenica - the worst single atrocity in Europe since World War II - and other crimes.
Having lived freely in the Serbian capital, Belgrade, he disappeared after the arrest of former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic in 2001.
Speculation mounted that Gen Mladic would soon be arrested when Mr Karadzic was captured in Belgrade in July 2008.
Larry Hollingworth, a logistics officer with the UN refugee agency who regularly met Gen Mladic during the Bosnian war, said he was "absolutely delighted" by news of the arrest.
"He also had, you know, quite a sense of humour. I remember once he said to me: 'You look like [Ernest] Hemingway.' And I said: 'I hope I don't sort of end up my life the way Hemingway ended up his, shooting himself.' And he said: 'Oh, if you keep offending me, you'll have no difficulty there.'"
'Not a calculation' Just before news of Thursday's arrest, UN war crimes chief prosecutor Serge Brammertz accused Serbia of failing to do enough to find Gen Mladic.
"The capture is the biggest obligation of Serbia," he said in a report sent to the UN Security Council.
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Srebrenica falls to Bosnian Serbs - archive BBC report from 1995
President Tadic rejected criticism that Serbia had only taken action following international pressure.
"It is crystal clear that we did not calculate when we had to arrest Ratko Mladic," he told the news conference on Thursday.
"We have been co-operating with the Hague Tribunal fully from the beginning of the mandate of this government."
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