BANJA LUKA, Bosnia-Hercegovina (AFP) - Bosnian Serb authorities admitted for the first time that more than 7,000 Muslims had been slaughtered by Serb forces in the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, Europe's worst atrocity since World War II.
"I am confirming that the number (of victims) is higher than 7,000. I cannot reveal the exact figures. It is up to the government to do it," an official from a special investigative commission told AFP Thursday on condition of anonymity.
In June the Bosnian Serb government admitted for the first time that Serb forces had committed the massacre and tried to cover up the crime, but it avoided giving a definite figure on the number of victims.
The commission included the figure of more than 7,000 victims -- a number which conforms to most independent assessments -- in a report that it presented to the Bosnian Serb government on Thursday.
"I think that the commission made the most objective and the most correct list of those killed in Srebrenica," commission member Djordje Stojakovic told AFP, without revealing the figures.
"We had more than 30 sources of information but the list is not final. I'm not sure that there will be a final list ever."
The Bosnian Serb government issued a report in 2002 which minimized the number of victims, triggering outrage among survivors and the international community.
Most Serbs deny that the massacre took place and continue to regard as heroes their political leader during the country's 1992-95 war, Radovan Karadzic, and his military commander, Ratko Mladic.
Both men have been indicted by the UN tribunal at The Hague for war crimes and genocide for their alleged roles in the Srebrenica massacre, but they remain at large somewhere in the former Yugoslavia.
The International Committee of the Red Cross estimates over 7,000 Muslim men and boys were killed when Bosnian Serb forces overran the UN protected enclave of Srebrenica in July 1995.
So far more than 6,000 bodies have been exhumed from mass graves near the town.
Srebrenica is the first episode in the bloody break-up of the former Yugoslavia that the UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague has ruled constituted genocide.