Srebrenica victims to be buried at memorial ceremony

The newly identified remains of 136 people killed in the Srebrenica massacre will be buried at ceremonies next week marking the 20th anniversary of the genocide.

"Out of 136 victims, 18 were teenagers at the time" of the killing, with some aged 16 and 17 years old, a spokeswoman for the Bosnian institute for missing persons Lejla Cengic told AFP.

The remains will be buried on July 11 at the Srebrenica memorial centre, which is in eastern Bosnia, as part of ceremonies commemorating the mid-July 1995 genocide.

Some 8,000 Muslim men and boys were killed by Bosnian Serb forces who had over run Srebrenica, a UN-protected Muslim enclave at the time.

The massacre -- which came towards the end of Bosnia's three-year civil war in which 100,000 people died -- was Europe's worst atrocity since World War II and has been labelled genocide by two international courts.

Among the victims identified by DNA tests, were members of families that lost all of their male members in the killing, Cengic said.

The remains were found in mass graves or in forests where some of the victims were killed in ambushes.

To date, 6,241 victims have been found, identified and buried at the memorial centre. About 230 others have been laid to rest in other cemeteries at their families' request, Cengic said.

Only parts of most victims' remains have been found. In many cases their bones were moved from mass graves to so-called "secondary" graves in an effort to hide the true extent of the massacre.

Remains of some victims have been found in several mass graves, as the bodies fragmented during the transfer from one mass burial site to another, Cengic said.