PRISTINA, Serbia-Montenegro, August 26 (AFP) - The bodies of 38 ethnic Albanians killed during the Kosovo war and exhumed in central Serbia were returned to their families Thursday, a United Nations official told AFP.
The bodies were among the remains of some 800 ethnic Albanians exhumed from a mass grave at the Batajnica training camp for the Serbian secret police near Belgrade, and two other sites in Serbia over the past two years.
Serbian authorities handed the remains to UN officials in Kosovo, who took them to a morgue in the western town of Orahovac, UN spokeswoman Mechthilde Henneke said. The bodies had been identified using DNA analysis.
Some 300 corpses have been identified and returned to families in Kosovo since the end of the southern Serbian province's 1998-99 war, when separatist ethnic Albanian guerrillas battled Serbian troops.
Almost 4,000 people from both the ethnic Albanian and Serb communities in the province went missing during the conflict, which ended with NATO military intervention and the establishment of UN administration over the territory.
An estimated 10,000 people were killed in the war. Out of 5,000 bodies exhumed since 1999, the UN has identified more than 400.