A forensic pathologist removes topsoil to reveal human remains at the mass grave site

SARAJEVO, September 18 (Islamonline.net & News Agencies) - The remains of almost 500 people, including women and children, slaughtered by Serbs have been exhumed from the largest mass grave from the Bosnian war, forensic experts said Thursday, September 18.

"So far we have found 364 complete and 121 incomplete skeletons," Ismet Music, a member of the Bosnian Muslim commission for missing people, told Agence France-Presse (AFP).

Experts expect to find between 70 and 100 more bodies by the end of the exhumation work, he added.

"It is the largest mass grave we have found so far," maintained Amor Masovic, head of the commission.

After eight weeks of digging, forensic experts expect to complete work at the site within the next two weeks.

The 40-meter-long (130 feet) and four-meter-deep (13 feet) grave is in mountainous countryside near the eastern town of Zvornik, which remains in the Serb-controlled part of Bosnia, some 80 kilometers (50 miles) northeast of Sarajevo.

Judging from the clothing found, the dead were all civilians believed to have been gunned down by Serb forces during the war, Music said.

"In one corner of the grave we found 11 skeletons of children aged between 18 months and 12 years, as well as the remains of 12 women", he asserted.

"Bullet holes were found in the skull of a three-year old, while the skeleton of a five or a six-year-old child had a bullet in the backbone," said the expert.

The remains unearthed so far are stored in a morgue in the northern town of Tuzla where it is hoped they can be identified.

The authorities were tipped off about the site - in an area known as Crni Vrh or Black Peak - by a witness to the burial of the bodies.

Identity documents found in the mass grave show that at least some of the victims were Muslim civilians from Zvornik and the nearby towns of Vlasenica and Bratunac, killed when Serb forces captured them at the outset of the 1992-1995 war.

In mid-1992 Serbs backed by the former Yugoslav People's Army (JNA) seized mainly Muslim eastern Bosnia, which includes Zvornik, and victimised its non-Serb residents.

Some 1,500 Zvornik residents are still missing following the Serbs' notorious wartime campaign of ethnic cleansing.

Relatives of the missing have been visiting the site every day, seeking news of their loved ones.

The grave is also believed to contain the remains of some of the 7,000 Muslim men and boys massacred after Serb forces overran the U.N. "safe haven" of Srebrenica in July 1995.

The Zvornik site is a so-called "secondary" grave where Serbs brought bodies from other sites to cover up their crimes.

Almost eight years after the end of the war, the fate of more than 16,000 missing people is still not known, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).

The remains of more than 17,000 people have so far been exhumed from some 300 mass graves in Bosnia.

Serb wartime leader Radovan Karadzic and his army commander Ratko Mladic, indicted by The Hague-based U.N. tribunal for genocide and war crimes their troops allegedly committed during Bosnia's war, are still at large.

Former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic is on trial at The Hague for war crimes and crimes against humanity for his role in the 1990s wars in Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo. For the Bosnian war he faces a separate charge of genocide.

The war left Bosnia split into two semi-independent entities; the Serbs' Republika Srpska (RS) and the Muslim-Croat Federation.