Crowds lined Sarajevo's main street 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 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.
It 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 (ICJ), both based in The Hague.
Although the ICJ cleared Serbia of direct involvement in genocide, it said Belgrade did breach international law by failing to prevent the killings. Srebrenica is located in Serb-controlled Republika Srpska, which along with the Muslim-Croat Federation makes up the two highly independent entities of Bosnia.
The international community's former High Representative in Bosnia, Christian Schwarz-Schilling, ordered last month that the memorial cemetery, just outside Srebrenica, be put under state jurisdiction.