The bodies of 19 people, believed to be Muslim civilians killed during the Bosnian war, have been exhumed from a mass grave in the Cajnice district near the border with Montenegro, a local missing persons' commission said on Sunday. The 19 are believed to have been part of a group of 65 people killed by Bosnian Serbs on May 16, 1992, as they attempted to flee to Montenegro soon after the outbreak of the three-year Bosnian war. Head of the missing persons' commission for the Gorazde region, Sefik Delhamet, said tins of food and blankets were found near the bodies, several of which were missing their skulls, around 80 kilometres southwest of the capital Sarajevo. Mr Delhamet said the dead probably came from the regions of Cajnice, Gorazde and nearby Foca. Several hundred Bosnian Muslims were killed when Bosnian Serb troops seized control of the Foca area in 1992. Foca is today part of the Serb-run Republika Srpska, which along with the Muslim-Croat Federation makes up post-war Bosnia. The International Committee of the Red Cross said more than 17,000 Bosnians are still unaccounted for, seven years after the end of the war that pitted Bosnian Serbs against Muslims and Croats, killing over 200,000.

"UN prosecutors have opened their genocide case against Slobodan Milosevic, vowing to prove that he played a leading role in the worst crimes against humanity in Europe since World War II," CNN Europe reports, in a story posted at http://europe.cnn.com/2002/WORLD/europe/09/26/hague.milosevic/index.html The trial for crimes in Kosovo finished earlier this month. In the Bosnia trial, Milosevic faces the most severe charge of genocide. "Murder, torture and deportation are among the [other] serious charges Milosevic, 61, now faces," CNN notes. After the prosecution outlined the case against the former Yugoslav leader, including large-scale murder, torture and expulsion of Muslims from large regions of Bosnia, Milosevic answered by showing a video that portrayed Serbs as the war's victims. "Milosevic, who has refused a lawyer and is conducting his own defence, looked rested after a two-week break in court hearings and listened closely to the prosecution, sometimes smirking or frowning," CNN Europe reported. "The former Yugoslav president has been charged for the mass execution of Muslims in the city of Srebrenica, and the three-year siege of Sarajevo, Bosnia's capital, when Serb snipers shot children, women and the elderly on the streets and in their homes. . . . "Outside, . . . , a dozen Bosnian protesters called for the arrest of former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic and his wartime general, Ratko Mladic, who remain at large despite also being indicted for genocide in Bosnia." Prosecutors are expected to call 106 witnesses against Milosevic in the Bosnia portion of the trial, and another 71 for the Croatia indictment. So far, the trial has increased Milosevic's popularity in Serbia, reports Time magazine's European edition, in an article posted at http://www.time.com/time/europe/magazine/article/0,13005,901020930-353524,00.html (A rally for radical Serb ultra-nationalist Vojislav Seselj -- endorsed by Milosevic in the race for Serbia's presidency -- drew an estimated 20,000 people in Novi Sad. "Seselj is the only man capable of protecting Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic," his aides told the cheering crowd, AFP reported. However, opinion polls show Seselj in third place among the electorate).

An apparent bid by federal president Vojislav Kostunica to curry favour with Serbian nationalists has rocked relations between Yugoslavia and Bosnia. While Kostunica was visiting the border town of Mali Zvornik on September 14 as part of campaigning for Serbia's presidential elections, the Democratic Party of Serbia, DSS, leader described neighbouring Republika Srpska, RS, as "part of the family, temporarily separated from the Serbian motherland". Haris Silajdzic, a Bosniak candidate for the Bosnian presidency, described the remarks as "one step away from declaration of war", claiming that "everything achieved in the process of normalisation" between the two neighbouring states had been destroyed as a result. Kostunica - who later described his comments as having been "maliciously misinterpreted" - maintained he has no plan to reunite the RS with Serbia, saying that he had only been calling for the eventual reunion of all of the former Yugoslavia's Serbs within the framework of the European Union.

Read more: Serbia: Kostunica Remarks Frighten Bosnia

"Saboteurs blew up a mosque in the Serbian part of Bosnia just three months after it was reopened following its destruction during the 1992-1995 war," the New York Times reported earlier this month. "Muslims expelled by Serbian forces at that time have only recently begun to return to the area, near the southeastern town of Gacko." The mosque, in Kljuc, suffered damage to the minaret, according to AP.