Siege of Srebrenica

The Missing Persons Institute of Bosnia and Herzegovina said on Friday that the mass grave in Gradina, which was discovered two days ago, is now being exhumed.

Prayers were said and mourners shed tears as 33 more victims Srebrenica massacres - defined as genocide by international courts - were laid to rest at a ceremony at the Potocari Memorial Centre during the annual commemoration on Thursday.

Emir Suljagic fell "hopelessly in love" with his first-ever girlfriend in the summer of 1992, when the place in which he lived at the time - Srebrenica - was under siege.

"I used to walk from Srebrenica to [the nearby village of] Potocari every second day to see her and spend some time with her. I did not mind going back at midnight or 1am during the war," he recalled.

"I will say what others will not. No one has the right to say that this crime did not happen."

These are the words of Goran Saric, the former commander of Republika Srpska's special police brigade, who was acquitted last November by the Bosnian state court of genocide in Srebrenica in July 1995.

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.

The Srebrenica massacres were classified as genocide by the UN-backed International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia and the International Court of Justice.

The US embassy in Sarajevo and Bosnia’s peace overseer criticised Bosnian Serb officials’ decision to establish a commission to probe crimes committed in Srebrenica during the war, which Bosniaks claim is a bid to rewrite history.

Former Bosniak Territorial Defence fighter Izet Arifovic, who was being tried for murdering three Serb civilians in the Srebrenica and Bratunac areas of Bosnia in 1992, has died.

Interpol has issued a ‘red notice’ for the arrest of Zoran Stupar, one of four former Bosnian Serb fighters charged with crimes against humanity over attacks on Bosniak villages in the Vlasenica area of eastern Bosnia in 1992.

The former commander of the Bosnian Army’s Fourth Corps, Ramiz Drekovic, was indicted for committing a war crime by ordering artillery attacks on a Serb-populated village in the Konjic area in 1995.