BOSNIA & HERZEGOVINA: Bosnian Serb police defused two large bombs yesterday near a memorial to victims of the Srebrenica massacre, the site of next week's huge ceremony to mark 10 years since the slaughter of some 8,000 Muslim civilians.
Tens of thousands of victims' relatives will join foreign dignitaries at the Potocari memorial centre next Monday, where some 1,500 policemen will guard an event that many fear will be a target for hardline Serbs who still dispute the events of July 1995.
Police spokesman Radovan Pejic said bomb disposal experts were called in after a tipoff from European Union peacekeepers who now patrol Bosnia, almost a decade after a three-year war left the former Yugoslav republic divided into Serb and Muslim Croat entities.
"In the early hours we found at two separate locations some 35kg of explosive with great destructive power," Mr Pejic said.
"It was ready to detonate. All you needed to do was light a slow-burning fuse and walk away. Experts told me it would have been a huge destructive force."
More than 1,300 victims of the Srebrenica massacre are buried at Potocari cemetery, and almost 600 more will be laid to rest as part of Monday's ceremony. Their bodies were found in more than 60 mass graves dotted around Bosnia, and many were moved several times as Serb forces tried to hide evidence of the slaughter.
The anniversary event has stoked tension in the area around Srebrenica, a so-called UN safe haven during the war that fell to Gen Ratko Mladic on July 11th, 1995, and which became the site of Europe's worst atrocity since the second World War.
Gen Mladic, along with his political ally Radovan Karadzic, are still on the run, nearly a decade after being indicted by the UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague.
They are still widely viewed as heroes in a region that saw some of the fiercest fighting and most vicious reprisals during the Bosnian war, when long-time Muslim and Serb neighbours turned on each other in a nightmare of internecine violence.
Many Serbs around Srebrenica refuse to accept that forces fighting in their name committed acts of such barbarity, while others blame Muslim fighters for launching similar attacks on Serb villages.
Next Tuesday - the day after the Srebrenica commemoration - Serbs in the neighbouring town of Bratunac will unveil a monument to what they say are more than 3,000 Serb victims of Muslim violence.
Carla del Ponte, the chief war crimes prosecutor at The Hague, has said she is too ashamed to attend the Srebrenica memorial while the two fugitives are still at large.