The 78 bodies were found in several graves in the area surrounding Vlasenica, 55 miles northeast of the capital, Sarajevo.

"They were all shot from close range and some of them had their hands tied," said Murat Hurtic, a local official who helped identify the victims. The bodies included a busload of people who were allegedly picked up on the street and taken by Serb forces to a nearby camp to be executed, Hurtic said.

Bosnian Serb forces are accused of running a camp in the nearby town of Susica, where local Muslims were allegedly rounded up and shot during the early part of the 1992-95 war.

Such mass reburials are relatively common in Bosnia, which is struggling to overcome the aftermath of the conflict. Government officials are supervising the excavation of mass graves throughout the country.

Bosnia's Serbs won control of Vlasenica in the early part of the war. The town became part of the Bosnian Serb ministate when the Dayton peace agreement ended the conflict in 1995. The other ministate is shared by Bosnia's Muslims and Croats.

Though Muslims say they are too afraid to return to their prewar homes for good, many wanted to come back Saturday to give their loved ones a traditional Muslim burial. The town's Serb residents watched the ceremony from their windows.

Among those buried was Mevludin Berbic, who was 29 when Bosnian Serb troops picked him up off the street in June 1992. His wife, Samra, 38, heard about his arrest and fled with her young daughter. She was seven months pregnant.

"He left to go to work," she said of her husband. "And never came back."

She returned with her children for the first time Saturday, weeks after identifying her husband's body that she recognized by a tobacco pouch she had gaven him as a present during their courtship.

It was the closest her 9-year-old son, Sejfo, had ever been to his father.

As Mevludin's body was lowered, Samra tried to remove Sejfo's hand from the coffin.

"Leave me alone," he said, and put it back. The grave diggers paused, and gave the family another moment.