Serbia's war crimes court has rejected the appeal of former Bosnian Serb General Ratko Mladic, paving the way to his extradition to the war crimes court in The Hague, a court spokeswoman told Reuters on Tuesday.

The Hague court indicted Mladic for genocide in the 43-month siege of Sarajevo and the massacre of 8,000 Muslims in Srebrenica during the 1992-95 Bosnian war in 1995.

Serbian security agents tracked the fugitive general last week, after 16 years on the run, to a farmhouse belonging to his cousin. In making the arrest, they removed a major obstacle to Serbia' bid to join the European Union.