Forensic experts have started digging for remains at what they say could be one of the biggest mass graves of Muslim victims from Bosnia's 1992-5 war.
Amor Masovic, head of the Muslim-led Commission for Missing Persons, today said it was unclear whether this was a "primary" mass grave holding bodies of Muslims killed early in the war in nearby Zvornik by the former Yugoslav army and Serb irregulars.
Other sources, according to Masovic, indicate this was a "secondary" mass grave linked to the 1995 Serb massacre of up to 8,000 Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica, meaning bodies were reburied here to hide traces of the crime.
"It could be both. By its size, this could be one of the biggest mass graves found so far, possibly containing hundreds of bodies," Masovic told journalists at the site, near the eastern town of Zvornik.
Bulldozers removed the upper, half-a-metre thick layer of earth from the site, which is 45 metres (yards) wide and 4.5 metres long and in a hilly, wooded area off a main road.
The experts - who included members of Masovic's commission, court officials and U.N. war crimes investigators - worked under sweltering heat on Monday and found part of a skull.
The biggest primary mass grave is in Glumina, where the bodies of 274 Muslims from Zvornik were found in 1998. Masovic's commission and U.N. investigators also found several secondary mass graves, each containing several hundred bodies.
"But here we will not know for sure until we dig deeper and reach the bodies," Masovic said, adding the work was expected to last for several weeks.
The site is just inside postwar Bosnia's Serb Republic.
Out of 28,000 people missing from the Bosnian war, around 16,500 have been exhumed so far and 11,500 have been identified.
Masovic' commission exhumed over 130 bodies of Zvornik Muslims earlier this month from several smaller mass graves outside the town. About 1,300 Muslims from Zvornik went missing in the war and the bodies of about 500 have been found.
Also in July, the commission found what it believed were three primary mass graves near Zvornik. It said bodies of the Srebrenica victims were dumped there before being removed to the suspected mass grave opened up on Monday.
Remains of about 5,000 Srebrenica Muslims have been found.
Bosnian Serb wartime leader Radovan Karadzic and his military chief Ratko Mladic, both fugitives, were indicted for genocide in Srebrenica by the U.N. war crimes court.