BOSNIAN DNA TEAM IDENTIFIES 10,000TH GENOCIDE VICTIM

SARAJEVO, Bosnia (August 29,2007) - A team of DNA experts in Bosnia said it had identified its 10,000th victim of the 1992-1995 Serbian,Montenegrin and Croatian aggressions against Bosnia.

"The 10,000th missing person to be identified using (a) unique DNA-led system was a man missing from the fall of Srebrenica in July 1995," the International Commission on Missing People (ICMP) said in a statement.

DNA analysis remains the only tool to identify thousands of nameless victims exhumed from mass graves across the former Yugoslavia.

The Sarajevo-based ICMP leads the process in an attempt to reveal the fate of 40,000 missing following the 1990s conflicts in Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo.

The ICMP,which was established in 1996,opened two laboratories in Bosnia and developed sophisticated software that matches DNA taken from a victim's bone with blood from a living relative.

The major challenge in Bosnia is the identification of the victims of the 1995 Srebrenica massacre where up to 10,000 Bosnian men and boys were slaughtered after the genocidal Serbian aggressor overran the UN-run enclave of the eastern Bosnian town of Srebrenica.

Their bodies had initially been buried in a dozen mass graves, but the Serbian aggressor later used bulldozers to move them in order to cover up their crime.

Some 3,000 genocide victims from Srebrenica have been identified so far.To date, the ICMP has made more than 12,000 DNA matches of different individuals in the region of the former Yugoslavia.

"While the work that has been carried out until today has been tremendous, we are just over half-way there," said ICMP director Kathryne Bomberger.

The commission hoped to make another "9,000 DNA matches," she said, adding that it hoped to carry on its work until at least 2010.

There are still more than 17,500 people missing in the region, including 13,000 in Bosnia, according to ICMP figures.