A Congolese warlord known as "the Terminator" who is accused of murder, rape and other atrocities arrived at the International Criminal Court's jail in the Netherlands early on Saturday, the court said.

Bosco Ntaganda, who walked off the street and gave himself up at the U.S. Embassy in Kigali in a surprise move on Monday, was flown in a private jet from the Rwandan capital to The Hague after being handed over to the court's custody.

After a 15-year career that spanned a series of Rwandan-backed rebellions in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo, he will appear in court on Tuesday for the first hearing in a process that could lead to him being put on trial for war crimes.

Ntaganda was most recently a commander in the M23 rebel movement, but his position weakened after the group split in two.

His removal from the conflict creates an opportunity to secure a peace agreement to end the year-old rebellion in a region dogged by conflicts.

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Ntaganda's surrender was the first time an ICC suspect had voluntarily handed themselves over to be in the court's custody.

He asked stunned U.S. officials at the embassy to be transferred to the court, where he will face charges of recruiting child soldiers, murder, ethnic persecution, sexual slavery and rape during the 2002-3 conflict in northeastern Congo's gold mining Ituri district.

His whereabouts had been unknown after hundreds of his fighters fled into Rwanda or surrendered to U.N. peacekeepers last weekend following their defeat by a rival faction of M23 rebels in the mineral-rich eastern Congo.

"Bosco thought his choice was the ICC or probable death," said Jason Stearns of the Rift Valley Institute.

Victory for victims
Foreign Minister Louise Mushikiwabo said Ntaganda flew out of Kigali in the custody of ICC officials following cooperation between the Rwandan, U.S. and Dutch governments.

A Reuters witness had seen a blacked-out U.S. Embassy vehicle under police escort drive along the perimeter of Kigali international airport. Shortly after, a private jet took off.

His first courtroom appearance, to confirm his identity, will be on Tuesday morning, the court said in a statement.

With an arrest warrant hanging over him, Ntaganda and his backers were seen as an obstacle to peace between the M23 and the Congolese government that the rival faction had shown signs of warming to.

"Bosco's arrest won't bring peace to the eastern Congo, but Bosco's arrest does spell a victory in the battle against impunity and the dismantling of one of the barriers to a peace process in the country," Stearns said.

The trial of Rwandan-born Ntaganda could prove an embarrassment to the Rwandan government, which has denied charges by a United Nations panel that it backs the M23 rebels.

ICC prosecutor Fatou Bensouda might seek to add additional charges related to rebellions that followed the alleged Ituri crimes, analysts said.

Wars in Congo have killed about five million people in the past decade and a half, and many eastern areas are still afflicted by violence from a number of rebel groups despite a decade-long U.N. peacekeeping mission.

"Bosco Ntaganda's arrival in The Hague will be a major victory for victims of atrocities in eastern Congo," said Geraldine Mattioli-Zeltner, international justice advocacy director at Human Rights Watch.

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THE HAGUE -- Judges at the international war crimes court sentenced former Liberian President Charles Taylor to 50 years in prison on Wednesday, saying he was responsible for "some of the most heinous and brutal crimes recorded in human history."

He had been convicted of supporting rebels in Sierra Leone who murdered and mutilated thousands during their country's brutal civil war in return for blood diamonds.

Ex-Liberia President Charles Taylor guilty in 'watershed' war-crimes case

The Special Court for Sierra Leone found Taylor guilty last month on 11 charges of aiding and abetting the rebels who went on a bloody rampage during the decade-long war that ended in 2002 with more than 50,000 dead.

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Presiding Judge Richard Lussick says the crimes Taylor was convicted of were of the "utmost gravity in terms of scale and brutality."

Blood diamonds? Supermodel thought they were 'dirty stones'

"The lives of many more innocent civilians in Sierra Leone were lost or destroyed as a direct result of his actions," Lussick said.

Taylor showed no emotion as Lussick handed down what will effectively be a life sentence. 

The 64-year-old warlord-turned-president is the first former head of state convicted by an international war crimes court since World War II.

'In a class of his own'
Prosecutors had asked judges at the Special Court for Sierra Leone to impose an 80-year sentence; Taylor's lawyers urged judges to hand down a sentence that offered him some hope of release before he dies.

Lussick said an 80-year sentence would have been excessive as Taylor was convicted of aiding and abetting crimes and not direct involvement. 

But the judge added that Taylor was "in a class of his own" compared to others convicted by the United Nations-backed court. 

"The special status of Mr. Taylor as a head of state puts him in a different category of offenders for the purpose of sentencing," Lussick said.  

At a sentencing hearing earlier this month, Taylor expressed "deepest sympathy" for the suffering of victims of atrocities in Sierra Leone, but insisted he had acted to help stabilize the West Africa region and claimed he never knowingly assisted in the commission of crimes.

"What I did...was done with honor," he said. "I was convinced that unless there was peace in Sierra Leone, Liberia would not be able to move forward."

However, judges ruled that Taylor armed and supplied the rebels in full knowledge they would likely use weapons to commit terrible crimes, in exchange for payments of "blood diamonds" often obtained by slave labor.

Prosecutors said there was no reason for leniency, given the extreme nature of the crimes, Taylor's "greed" and misuse of his position of power.

"The purposely cruel and savage crimes committed included public executions and amputations of civilians, the display of decapitated heads at checkpoints, the killing and public disembowelment of a civilian whose intestines were then stretched across the road to make a check point, public rapes of women and girls, and people burned alive in their homes," prosecutor Brenda Hollis wrote in a brief appealing for the 80-year sentence.

Taylor stepped down and fled into exile in Nigeria after being indicted by the court in 2003. He was finally arrested and sent to the Netherlands in 2006.

While the Sierra Leone court is based in that country's capital, Freetown, Taylor's trial is being staged in Leidschendam, a suburb of The Hague, for fear holding it in West Africa could destabilize the region. 

The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.

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Updated at 3:34 p.m. ET: MOSCOW -- Russia further backed away from its support of Syrian President Bashar Assad on Monday, saying his government bears the main responsibility for the violence in the country and calling for a full investigation into its role in the deaths of more than 100 civilians in Houla. 

"Both sides have obviously had a hand in the deaths of innocent people, including several dozen women and children. This area is controlled by the rebels, but it is also surrounded by government troops," Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said after talks in Moscow with visiting British Foreign Secretary William Hague. 

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Meanwhile, international mediator Kofi Annan, who arrived in Damascus Monday for talks with senior Syrian officials, said he was horrified by the killings in Houla and urged the Syrian government to take bold steps to show it was serious about reaching a peaceful solution to the country's crisis.

Lavrov spoke a day after Russia agreed to join the rest of the U.N. Security Council in blaming the Syrian government for attacking residential areas in Houla, a collection of villages near the central city of Homs. The council, however, avoided saying who was responsible for the massacre of at least 108 men, women and children. 

Opposition activists said Assad's forces killed at least 41 people in an artillery assault on the city of Hama shortly after the U.N. Security Council condemned Friday's massacre in nearby Houla. The authorities in Damascus issued a denial that troops played any role at Houla, rejecting the U.N. version of events.

Lavrov said there was no doubt that government forces had used artillery and tanks to shell Houla, but he noted that many of the dead appeared to have been shot at close range or tortured. "The guilt has to be determined objectively," he said. "No one is saying that the government is not guilty, and no one is saying that the armed militants are not guilty." 

But Lavrov did issue some of Russia's harshest criticism of Assad to date, saying the Syrian  government "bears the main responsibility for what is going on" because it is failing to provide for the security of Syrian citizens. He hedged the criticism by claiming that Syria's government is facing an increased threat from terrorists, whose bombings have the "clear signature of al-Qaida." 

Alexei Malashenko, a Middle East expert with the Carnegie Moscow Center, said Russia can no longer defend Assad's government and may be warning him that he needs to change his approach. 

"Bashar Assad is driving himself and Russia into a corner," Malashenko said. "If this goes on, Russia will have no other option" but to pull its support. "Bashar has definitely gotten the sense that he may lose Russia's sympathy and he may step back a bit." 

Lavrov and Hague both called for greater efforts to implement special envoy Annan's six-point peace plan, which calls on both sides to respect a cease-fire. 

Speaking shortly after arriving in Damascus, Annan said he expected to have "serious and frank discussions" with Assad. The two men are due to meet on Tuesday, according to the Syrian Foreign Ministry.

Clinton: Syria leader's 'rule by murder' must end 

Annan said the massacre in Houla was "an appalling crime, and the (U.N.) Security Council has rightly condemned it." Western countries have blamed Assad's forces for the killings, a charge Damascus denies.

"I urge the (Syrian) government to take bold steps to signal that it is serious in its intention to resolve this crisis peacefully, and for everyone involved to help create the right context for a credible political process," Annan told reporters on his arrival in Damascus. 

"It's right, as Sergey Lavrov has just done, to call on all parties to cease violence, and we are not arguing that all violence in Syria is the responsibility of the Assad regime, although it has the primary responsibility for such violence," Hague said. 

Lavrov added that "we don't support the Syrian government, we support Kofi Annan's plan." 

The Russian envoy called for everyone in the international community to exert more pressure on both sides to implement Annan's plan, saying it was not clear from talks with opposition members that they were getting the message that the plan had full international support.

He said talk about the need for Assad to step down cast doubt on the West's commitment to the Annan plan and encouraged the opposition to keep up the fight. 

Hague, however, confirmed that Britain still believes Assad should stand aside. 

"But the important thing is that the Annan plan is pursued in whatever way it can be pursued," he said. "The alternatives are the Annan plan or ever-increasing chaos in Syria, and a descent closer and closer to all-out civil war and collapse." 

'Boiling point': On Lebanon's Syria Street, a civil war brews

China on Monday also condemned the killings of civilians in Houla and called for an end to the violence, but gave no indication it was rethinking its strategy toward the fighting in Syria. 

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Weimin said that Beijing fully supports Annan's mediation efforts and the UN monitors. 

The protests against Assad began in March 2011 and turned into an uprising after his government responded with a violent crackdown on dissent. The U.N. estimated that at least 9,000 people were killed in the first year of the conflict, but hundreds more have been killed since then. 

Reuters and The Associated Press contributed to this report. 

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THE HAGUE, Netherlands - Prosecutors in the genocide trial of Serb general Ratko Mladic on Thursday described five days of terror in the Bosnian enclave of Srebrenica in July 1995, when troops under his command massacred more than 7,000 unarmed Muslim boys and men.

Mladic, 70, sat listening with his back to the public after being warned at the start of his trial on Wednesday for making a throat-slitting gesture to a relative of Srebrenica victims.

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The massacre, Europe's worst atrocity since World War Two, helped finally to galvanize Western powers into launching air strikes on Serb forces to bring the 1992-95 Bosnian war to an end.

"This was and will remain genocide," said prosecutor Peter McCloskey, showing grainy video footage of bodies outside a warehouse where about 1,000 prisoners were gunned down.

"The evidence of this crime is overwhelming ... We will focus on linking General Mladic and his men to the crime."

Mladic is accused of commanding Bosnian Serb troops who waged a campaign of murder and persecution to drive Muslims and Croats out of territory they considered part of Serbia. His troops rained shells and snipers' bullets down on civilians in the 44-month siege of the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo.

However, there was a blow for efforts to ensure that the trial of Mladic, whose lawyers say he has had three strokes and a heart attack, does not parallel that of Slobodan Milosevic, which lasted so long that he died before a verdict was reached.

Srebrenica: The story that will never end

The judges accepted a defense argument that prosecutors had not disclosed their case properly, but did not say if they would grant the full six-month delay requested by the lawyers before the trial enters its next stage, where evidence is presented.

Presiding judge Alphons Orie said judges will analyze the "scope and full impact" of the error and aim to establish a new starting date "as soon as possible." The presentation of evidence was supposed to begin later this month.

Mladic looks frail and thin compared to the stocky commander seen in wartime barking orders to shell Bosnian Muslim positions, but has benefited visibly from the medical treatment he has received while in detention.

McCloskey said prosecutors planned to call scores of witnesses, including 11 survivors of the massacre as well as executioners from the Bosnian Serb army.

"In only five days, forces of Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic expelled the population from Srebrenica and Zepa and murdered more than 7,000 Muslim men and boys."

He said nearly 6,000 bodies had been exhumed from mass graves and secondary sites where bodies were reburied to conceal them in remote mountain areas. Their remains have been identified by DNA testing.

In the public area, mothers of Srebrenica victims wept as they listened to the proceedings.

"My husband was 45 years old. He was taken away and killed only because he had a different name and different religion," said Zumra Sahomerovic.

"There is no punishment good enough for him (Mladic)."

The prosecution says the massacre was part of a strategic plan, devised with Milosevic, then Serbian president, and Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, to "cleanse" parts of the Balkans of non-Serbs and create a pure Serb state.

Among the 11 charges against Mladic are genocide, murder, rape, imprisonment and acts of terror for actions that also include the 43-month siege of the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo, in which 10,000 died, and the establishment of a number of brutal prison camps.

Like Karadzic, who is also on trial in The Hague, Mladic faces a sentence of up to life imprisonment if found guilty.

Both were indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia at the end of the Bosnian war in 1995, but remained free in Serbia for more than a decade before being tracked down. 

Reuters and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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Updated at 4:57 a.m.: THE HAGUE, Netherlands -- Bosnian Serb general Ratko Mladic went on trial for genocide on Wednesday, accused of leading the slaughter of 8,000 unarmed Muslim boys and men in Srebrenica in 1995, Europe's worst atrocity since World War II.

The ailing 70-year-old Mladic's appearance at the U.N. tribunal for the former Yugoslavia marks the end of a long wait for justice to survivors of the 1992-95 war that left some 100,000 people dead. He is accused of 11 charges of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes.

Mladic, in a suit and tie and looking healthier than at previous pretrial hearings, gave a thumbs-up and clapped to supporters in the court's public gallery as the trial got under way. He occasionally wrote notes and showed no emotion as prosecutors began outlining his alleged crimes.

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One woman in the public gallery called him a "vulture" as prosecutors began two days of laying out their case for judges.

Presiding Judge Alphons Orie of the Netherlands said at the outset that the court was considering postponing the presentation of evidence, due to start May 29, due to "errors" by prosecutors in disclosing evidence to the defense. Prosecutor Dermot Groome said he would not oppose a "reasonable adjournment."

Mladic allegedly orchestrated not only the week-long massacre in Srebrenica, at the time a U.N. "safe haven", but also the 43-month siege of Sarajevo, in which more than 10,000 people were killed by snipers, machineguns and heavy artillery.

Munira Subasic, who lost 22 family members in the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, was among a group of relatives of war dead heading into the courtroom to face Mladic.

The 65-year-old said she wanted to look him in the eye "and ask him if he will repent for what he did."

'Murderer!'
Mladic, who was arrested last May after 16 years on the run, has dismissed the charges as "monstrous" and says he is too ill to stand trial. The court entered a "not guilty" plea on his behalf.

The case has inevitably stirred up violent emotions in the Balkans. Survivors watching proceedings from the court gallery have shouted "Murderer!" and "Killer!" at a man nicknamed the "Butcher of Bosnia."

For his part, Mladic has been angry and defiant during pre-trial hearings, heckling the judge, shouting and interrupting the proceedings.

"The whole world knows who I am," he told a hearing last year. "I am General Ratko Mladic. I defended my people, my country ... now I am defending myself."

Mladic was in charge of the Bosnian Serb army when, over several days in July 1995, Serb fighters overran the Srebrenica enclave in eastern Bosnia, theoretically under the protection of Dutch U.N. peacekeepers.

Srebrenica: The story that will never end

Video footage shot at the time showed Mladic mingling with Muslim prisoners.

Shortly afterwards, the men and boys were separated from the women, stripped of identification, and shot.

The dead were bulldozed into mass graves, then later dug up with excavators and hauled away in trucks to be better hidden from the world, in dozens of remote mass graves.

Prosecutors say Mladic was part of a "joint criminal enterprise to eliminate the Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica by killing the men and boys ... and forcibly removing the women, young children and some elderly men".

Mladic is also held responsible for the siege and bombardment of the Bosnian capital Sarajevo, which prosecutors said was intended to "spread terror among the civilian population."

The horrors of the siege, together with the Srebrenica massacre, eventually galvanized world opinion in support of the campaign of Western airstrikes on Bosnian Serb targets that brought the conflict to an end shortly after.

Mladic was indicted in 1995 along with Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serbs' political leader.

Yet both remained free in Serbia for more than a decade before being tracked down and sent to The Hague. Karadzic's trial is already under way.

Defense lawyers say they have not had enough time to review the huge case file prepared by prosecutors and asked for the trial to be postponed, but the request was denied.

411 witnesses
Serge Brammertz, the court's chief prosecutor, has dismissed Mladic's assertion that he is too frail to sit through a 200-hour prosecution case involving testimony from 411 witnesses.

His appearance in The Hague is testament to the work of the tribunal, which has defied skeptics by managing, in the course of 19 years, to arrest all its 161 indictees.

But some victims still fear that Mladic, who has received physical therapy for a possible stroke, could escape judgment by dying in mid-trial.

Mladic's mentor, former Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic, the architect of the Balkan wars, died in detention in 2006, a few months before a verdict in his trial for genocide and other war crimes in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo.

Reuters and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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