SARAJEVO - A team of DNA experts in Bosnia Monday said it had identified its 10,000th victim from the Balkan country's brutal inter-ethnic war.
"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 the Serbian province of 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 some 8,000 Muslim men and boys were slaughtered after Serb forces overran the UN-run enclave.
Their bodies had initially been buried in a dozen mass graves, but Serbs later used bulldozers to move them in order to cover up their crime.
Some 3,000 Srebrenica victims 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, inclusing 13,000 in Bosnia, according to ICMP figures.
08/27/2007 14:37 GMT