BOSNIAN authorities have arrested nine former soldiers suspected of killing 44 civilians during the Bosnian war, while also today commemorating a leader who was jailed for war crimes. 

A total of eleven soldiers are suspected of the killings in September 1992 in the area of Sokolac, south-east Bosnia – one still at large and another already in prison for other charges.

The soldiers allegedly separated men and boys from women and girls in the village of Novoseoci during the 1992-95 Bosnian war before taking the males away to a nearby waste dump and killing them, the prosecutor’s office said in a statement. 

The bodies of the victims, aged between 14 and 82, were left at the dump and covered in waste and rubble from the local mosque which had been blown up. 

All but one of the victim’s remains have been exhumed from the site, and post mortems revealed a total of 178 bullet wounds. 

The Bosnian Serb president, prime minister and other officials today attended an event to commemorate Momcilo Krajisnik, an MP during the conflict who was sentenced to 20 years by the UN war-crimes tribunal in The Hague for persecuting and expelling non-Serbs. 

Mr Krajisnik died on Tuesday, aged 75, after contracting Covid-19. He had been released from a British prison in 2013 after serving two-thirds of his sentence. 

The gathering has been condemned as an indication of the continued denial of Bosnian Serb wartime atrocities. 

More than 100,000 people died during the war in Bosnia, which erupted when the country’s Serbs rebelled against independence from the former Yugoslavia and moved to create their own state.