July 10, 2007	Tuesday	Jamadi-us-Sani 24, 1428

SARAJEVO, July 9: Crowds lined Sarajevo’s main street on Monday as a convoy of trucks carried the remains of 465 Bosnian Muslims killed in Srebrenica — Europe’s worst massacre since World War II.

The three trucks were headed for Srebrenica where the remains will be buried on Wednesday, the 12th anniversary of the massacre in which thousands were slaughtered.

Up to 30,000 Srebrenica survivors and victims' relatives were expected to attend a solemn religious ceremony and the funeral at the memorial cemetery where the remains of more than 2,400 of those killed are already buried.

They will be joined by the UN chief war crimes prosecutor Carla Del Ponte, as well as 2,000 people who set off on Sunday on a four-day symbolic march to the eastern town.

Apart from one 75-year-old woman, the remains carried by Monday's convoy were all of male victims, aged between 13 and 77. They were retrieved from mass graves around the eastern town and later identified by DNA analysis.

At the end of Bosnia’s 1992-95 war, Serb forces overran the then UN-protected enclave of Srebrenica, summarily killing some 8,000 Muslim men and boys.

Over 1,000 policemen will be deployed in Srebrenica on Wednesday for the anniversary.

The victims of the massacre were initially buried in a dozen mass graves, but the Bosnian Serbs moved them later to other locations in order to cover up the event.

The body parts were separated during reburial using bulldozers, and forensic experts sometimes found parts of a single person buried in three different graves.

DNA analysis remains the only tool for identification.

New Srebrenica victims are still being unearthed at a mass grave discovered only last week in the village of Budak, outside the town.

Some 3,195 Srebrenica victims have been identified so far, while 5,000 bags filled with human remains believed to account for 1,000 people still await DNA identification in special morgue facilities.—AFP