Bosnia:International investigators are to help a new Bosnian prosecutor's office based in Srebrenica investigate some 17,000 people suspected of involvement in the 1995 massacre of Muslims in the town.
A Bosnian Serb commission gave the state prosecutor a list of suspects in 2005, two years after it was created under pressure from western states concerned over the lack of convictions of people for the murder of some 8,000 Muslim men and boys.
The commission found that 19,473 Bosnian Serbs, both soldiers and civilians, had some role in the events of July 1995 in Srebrenica, which became the worst atrocity in Europe since the second World War.
The list, which includes people accused of direct involvement in the killings and those who allegedly played a relatively peripheral role in events, identifies 17,074 individuals by name.
A spokesman for the new international high representative in Bosnia, Miroslav Lajcak, said the state prosecutor would open a special office in Srebrenica to handle the investigation, and that foreign experts would assist local police and prosecutors.
Last month, on the eve of the anniversary of the massacre and just a week after taking office, Mr Lajcak sacked a top policeman and suspended 35 more who were suspected of involvement in the Srebrenica killings. He also ordered the seizure of passports belonging to 93 officials who are being investigated for their role.
Several senior Bosnian Serb army officers have been sentenced by the UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague over the Srebrenica events, and others are being tried in Bosnia. But top genocide suspects Radovan Karadzic, the wartime Bosnian Serb leader, and Ratko Mladic, his military commander, are still at large.
News of the investigation and creation of a dedicated prosecutor's office in Srebrenica will be welcomed by Bosnia's Muslims, many of whom deeply resent the fact that Srebrenica itself is now controlled by Bosnian Serbs, the people who over-ran it in 1995.
Local Muslims have appealed to the international community to grant Srebrenica self-rule, but the Bosnian Serb government in Banja Luka deeply opposes such a move.
