Bosnia mass grave reveals secrets

Mladic (left) and Karadzic have been indicted by the U.N. court for genocide for the Srebrenica massacre

SREBRENICA, Bosnia-Herzegovina -- Forensic experts discovered a mass grave in northeastern Bosnia that may contain up to 100 bodies of Muslims killed in the Srebrenica massacre of 1995.

Murat Hurtic, a member of the Muslim Commission for Missing Persons, said the mass grave was found Monday near the Serb-held village of Kamenica, 45 miles northeast of Sarajevo.

"We believe they were Muslims killed in Srebrenica," Hurtic told The Associated Press.

This month marked the seventh anniversary of the killing of some 8,000 Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica in what was supposed to be a United Nations "safe area."

When Bosnian Serbs captured the Srebrenica enclave on July 11, 1995 and rounded up the Muslim men, lightly-armed Dutch peacekeepers had no orders to fight and stood by helplessly.

It was the worst civilian massacre in Europe since World War II.

IN-DEPTH Srebrenica: Five days of evil   • Survivor's Story   • Gallery   • Massacre background   • Rebuilding Srebrenica   • Prayers for the dead   • Grief of the widows   • Mass grave found   • War crimes defendants   • Profile: Radko Mladic   • Profile: Radovan Karadzic

The remains of more than half of the victims have already been found in various mass graves in eastern Bosnia.

Hurtic said the newly discovered grave contained bodies that had been brought from graves elsewhere for reburial in an attempt to hide the remains from war crime investigators.

A preliminary investigation on Monday showed it would not be possible to determine immediately exactly how many bodies are in the grave "because they were disintegrated somewhere else and then dumped into this mass grave."

"But there will be 100 for sure," Hurtic said. The final count on the number of victims will be determined after DNA tests are done, he said.

Also on Tuesday, another agency -- the International Commission on Missing Persons -- opened Bosnia's third DNA laboratory in the Serb administrative centre of Banja Luka. The labs analyse DNA samples from surviving family members to match and identify victim remains.

Laboratories in Sarajevo and the northern town of Tuzla have identified around 550 victims during the last two years.

Thousands marked the seventh anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre earlier this month

Ed Huffine, the international commission's director of forensic science, said the lab in Banja Luka will specialise in the most challenging cases, while labs in Sarajevo and Tuzla will continue to process the majority of cases.

"Beginning in September, we plan to process in all three labs a total of 250 to 300 cases per month," Huffine said.

Since the end of the war, which killed an estimated 200,000 people, close to 10,000 bodies have been exhumed. Experts believe it could take years to identify them all.

A U.N. war crimes court has indicted Bosnian Serb wartime political leader Radovan Karadzic and his military chief Ratko Mladic for genocide for masterminding the Srebrenica assault. However, both men have so far evaded capture and trial.

The Yugoslav president at the time, Slobodan Milosevic, is currently on trial in The Hague accused of 66 counts of war crimes in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo.