Bosnian Serbs Compile Srebrenica List

"The commission has identified 19,473 participants in the events in Srebrenica, including (Bosnian Serb) army, defence ministry and interior ministry" personnel, an official who helped compile the list told reporters.

"Among all those from the list there are also those who gave orders (for the killings) and their executioners, but the commission was not tasked ... with determining the number of executioners," said Smajil Cekic.

The secret list, which has been compiled since 2003, includes almost 900 people still thought to be working for the Bosnian Serb government, army or police. The list will be forwarded to the prosecution office of the Bosnian court for war crimes, Cekic added.

"Taking obligations seriously"

The office of the international high representative in Bosnia, Paddy Ashdown, said the list showed that "finally the (Bosnian Serb) government has taken its obligations seriously."

It added that it expected the UN war crimes court and the local judiciary to "prioritize their investigations to focus initially on individuals who are still holding an office in (Bosnian Serb) or Bosnia's institutions."

The international community had asked the Bosnian Serb government to provide prosecutors in Bosnia with a full list of the names of those deployed in the area at the time of the massacre, in which more than 7,000 Muslim males were killed.

Bosnian Serbs had previously downplayed the slaughter, the worst single atrocity in Europe since World War II, which has been classified as an act of genocide by the UN war crimes tribunal at The Hague.

Main suspects still at large

The massacre at Srebrenica is the basis of the key charges, including genocide, laid by the tribunal against former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic.

More than a decade after the massacre, two of the main suspected culprits -- Bosnian Serb wartime leader Radovan Karadzic and his army chief, Ratko Mladic -- remain at large.