1000s attend ceremonies to rebury Bosnian war victims

Thousands of mourners went to the Veljaci cemetery on Saturday to attend the funeral ceremonies for 34 Muslims, whose bodies were found in mass graves in and around Bratunac, AFP reported.

The victims -- among them three children aged three, four, and six -- were killed at the beginning of the 1992-1995 war but their remains were only identified after DNA analysis last year.

It is believed that over 600 Muslims were killed in the region at the beginning of the war.

Some 252 victims are buried in the Veljaci cemetery alone.

In 1992, Bosnian Serb forces embarked on a campaign of violence, expelling all non-Serbs in an act of ethnic cleansing.

They took control of almost two-thirds of Bosnian territory at the beginning of the conflict, which left more than 100,000 people dead and displaced nearly two million others.

In 2004, the UN war crimes tribunal sentenced the former Bosnian Serb political leader, Miroslav Deronjih, to 10 years in prison.

He had pled guilty to ordering an attack against the town of Glogova in the Bratunac region in May 1992 that killed 60 Bosnian Muslims.

Deronjic died in 2007 in a prison in Sweden.