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Hundreds of Bosnian Muslims Attend Funeral of Massacre Victims
VISEGRAD, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Aug 5 (News Agencies) - Several hundred Bosnian Muslims gathered at the main cemetery of this Serb-held town amid tight security Sunday for the funeral of 152 Muslims massacred here during Bosnia's 1992-1995 war.
Bosnia's chief imam Mustafa Ceric led a half hour prayer for the victims - of which only 16 have been identified - a Muslim parliamentarian in the Bosnian Serb parliament told local radio.
Muslims, who made up to 63 percent of Visegrad's population before the war, were either forced to leave or were killed by Serb forces who seized the town, 90 kilometers (55 miles) east of Sarajevo, at the beginning of the war.
Heavy security was put in place for the ceremony with an increased presence of U.N. police monitors, as well as NATO-led Stabilization Force (SFOR) helicopters patrolling the area from above.
Bosnian Serb police lined the road from Sarajevo, where a convoy of 18 buses carrying Muslims crossed Bosnian Serb territory on its way to the funeral at Visegrad.
Bosnian Serb police sources, who insisted on anonymity, said that some 1,000 police had been deployed to prevent the outbreak of inter-ethnic violence.
On May 7, violence broke out in the western town of Banja Luka as several thousand Bosnian Serbs militants protested the corner stone laying ceremony for the town's central mosque, which was destroyed during the war.
One Muslim died from injuries inflicted by stone-throwing Serb protesters.
A second attempt to lay the corner stone went ahead on June 18, though clashes again broke out, injuring 13 police and three rioters, and more than 60 rioters were detained by police.
Bosnian Serb Mitar Vasiljevic has been indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for former
Yugoslavia (ICTY) for atrocities committed against ethnic Muslims in Visegrad and is currently awaiting trial in The Hague.
Two other Serbs, Milan Lukic and Sredoje Lukic, have also been indicted for war crimes but they remain at large.
The Dayton peace accords that ended Bosnia's war left the country divided into two entities -- Serbs' Republika Srpska and the Muslim-Croat federation.
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