Ethnic groups in Bosnia and Herzegovina

"The mortal remains of my mother and sister could have fitted into two nylon bags. I identified my late mother on the basis of several pieces of a dress that she wore," Buturovic recalled.

"We recommended to the Bosnian state prosecution to reconstitute regional teams that they had in order to maintain expertise in a particular area of Bosnia and Herzegovina. I think a part of [the problem] is the management, a part of it is the quality of indictments, so I think that there is an issue there," Berton explained.

When a 1995 peace deal ended the Bosnian war with a complicated system of ethnic division and power balancing, reports emerged of mainly ethnic Serbs exhuming their loved ones from graves on territory left under the control of Bosniaks and Croats, particularly suburbs of the capital, Sarajevo.

Bosniak Sefik Dzaferovic (R) and Croat Zeljko Komsic (2-R), members of the presidency. EPA-EFE/FEHIM DEMIR

The presidency - comprising a Bosniak, Serb and Croat - was unable to agree the agenda for Tuesday's session and so postponed the meeting and a decision on appointing a prime minister, or the chair of the Council of Ministers.

Former prisoners will lay flowers at a ceremony on Sunday to commemorate the suffering of Bosniak civilians held by Bosnian Croat forces at the Kostana Hospital in Stolac in 1993, an event organised by the Association of Camp Prisoners of Stolac.

Croatian President Kolinda Grabar-Kitarovic, on a three-day visit to Israel, on Wednesday denied calling neighbouring Bosnia and Herzegovina an unstable country taken over by militant Islam and connected to Iran - remarks reported in a Jerusalem Post article that sparked hostile reactions in Bosnia and Herzegovina - and which the newspaper has since deleted.

Bosniac National Council considers that the attitude of the Committee for the standardization of Serbian language that there is no Bosniak language, linguistically different from Serbian, presents yet "another chauvinist outburst of hatred and hostility of the part of the academic community in Serbia towards Bosniaks, and Bosnian as their mother tongue".

Flowers were lowered from Mostar's Old Bridge on Tuesday night at a commemoration for the victims of the 1990s wars in the Balkans held as part of an event to mark the 15th anniversary of the bridge's reconstruction.

There were 400 reservist police officers in Visegrad before the war, and the force was multi-ethnic. However, as the conflict began, 183 more officers were recruited by the Serb-run police station in the town.

A number of them had criminal records, said Huso Kurspahic, the former commander of the police station in Medjedja, near Visegrad.

The Bosnian prosecution on Thursday called on the state court in Sarajevo to increase the six-year sentence handed down last year to former Bosnian Serb soldier Zdravko Lubarda for crimes against humanity against Bosniaks.