The remains of more than 400 Bosnian Muslims killed in Srebrenica will be buried there next month on the 12th anniversary of Europe's worst atrocity since World War II, organisers said on Friday. The remains of 436 victims had been found in mass graves in the eastern town region and recently identified by DNA analysis.
Thousands of the Srebrenica victims' relatives and the massacre survivors are expected to attend on July 11 a joint funeral at the cemetery where more than 2,400 victims have already been buried.
Some 8,000 Muslim men and boys were summarily executed in only a few days after Bosnian Serb forces overran the then United Nations-protected Muslim enclave on July 11, 1995.
Their bodies had initially been buried in a dozen mass graves, but Bosnian Serbs moved them later by bulldozers to a number of other locations in order to cover up the crime. The victims' body parts were separated during reburial, and forensic experts sometimes found parts of a single person buried in three different mass graves.
The remains can only be identified by DNA analysis. Following Bosnia's 1992-1995 war forensic experts found some 60 mass graves around Srebrenica. The slaughter is the only episode of Bosnia's bloody war that has been ruled a genocide by the UN war crimes tribunal and the International Court of Justice, both based in The Hague.
Bosnian Serb wartime leader Radovan Karadzic and his military commander Ratko Mladic, the two people considered the most responsible for the massacre, still remain at large.
Karadzic is believed to be hiding in Bosnia's Serb-controlled parts and Serbia and Mladic is thought to have found refuge in Serbia. According to figures often used by local and international officials Bosnia's inter-ethnic war claimed some 200,000 lives. However, a recent independent study showed that up to 100,000 people were killed during the war.
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