Mortal remains of at least 35 victims will be buried this year at the collective funeral in the Potocari Memorial Centre, the Spokesperson for the Missing Persons Institute Lejla Cengic confirmed on Thursday.

“This is not the final number and some families may opt for the burial by the funeral date. There are nearly 170 of identified victims in the identification centre in Tuzla, but the families haven't decided to bury them due to incomplete remains,” explained Cengic.

Families and friends of the victims will mark another anniversary of the 1995 mass murders of some 8,000 Srebrenica Bosniaks on July 11 and will lay dozens of newly found bodies to rest next to the ones already buried at the memorial centre. Every year, thousands attend the ceremony, including politicians and foreign diplomats.

Cengic explained that the victims’ remains were found mostly in the secondary mass graves, which is why the bodies were incomplete. “This funeral will definitely bury the smallest number of victims, and the reason why is that we haven't found a mass grave recently,” said Cengic.

The institute, with the assistance of the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP), has been searching for and identifying the victims buried in mass graves across the Srebrenica region and further. Over 7,000 of the victims have been recovered so far and 6,575 have been buried in the memorial centre to date.

The UN's International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) ruled in 2004 that the massacre of the Srebrenica, the enclave which was declared the UN's safe zone in 1993, constituted a genocide. The ruling was upheld by the International Court of Justice in 2007.