Sarajevo: Hundreds of people paid homage Saturday to 127 victims of the Srebrenica massacre in wartime Bosnia, whose bodies have been found in mass graves.
Their bodies, the latest to be identified of over 8,000 who died, will be buried at the memorial site in Srebrenica on Monday, on the 21th anniversary of the mass killing.
A truck carrying the coffins stopped outside the presidency in Sarajevo where the crowd laid flowers and recited prayers for those who perished in the worst atrocity in Europe since World War II.
More than 8,000 Muslim men and boys were killed and their bodies dumped in mass graves by Bosnian Serb forces in the July 1995 massacre, five months before the end of Bosnia's inter-ethnic war.
"This year, it is even sadder. I have already buried my husband, my brother, my brother-in-law and my uncle," all killed at Srebrenica, Munevera Bogilovic told AFP.
At present, some 6,300 victims are buried at the Srebrenica memorial site and 230 in other cemeteries, according to Lejla Cengic, spokeswoman for the Bosnian institute of missing persons.
"The remains of more than 7,000 victims have been recovered and (the remains of) more than a thousand people are still being looked for," she told AFP.
Former Bosnian Serb political leader Radovan Karadzic was convicted in March of war crimes for his role in the Srebrenica killings, considered a genocide by the UN-backed criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. He was sentenced to 40 years in prison.
Bosnian Serb military chief Ratko Mladic is still on trial in The Hague for war crimes and genocide at Srebrenica.
AFP
