Ahlul Bayt News Agency - ABNA - Battling constant rain, a forensics team races against time to find the remains of Muslim victims of the 1992-1995 Bosnian war in the bed of an emptied lake.
They have only days left before Lake Perucac, a reservoir for a hydropower dam in the east of the country, is refilled.
In raincoats and rubber boots, the team trudges through the mud towards a small green flag marking the spot where a skeleton was found the day before.
"The bones are in fairly good condition. They have probably been preserved by water and mud," forensics expert Salih Hodzic told AFP.
Also there, barely discernable, is a grey sweater, a pair of socks and a man's black shoe. There is no skull, but the team is pleased to have found a nearly complete skeleton.
One worker writes the name of the area, Donje Stitarevo, and a file number -- 303 -- on a piece of white paper that is put next to the remains. They are photographed, and then exhumed and placed in a white body bag.
Of the more than 330 sets of partial remains found so far, this is one of the few almost complete ones.
The search of the lake and part of the Drina River, which marks the border between Serbia and Bosnia, started late July when water levels dropped to an historic low because of repairs being carried out on the dam.
From Thursday the lake was to be slowly refilled, its level rising two meters (over six feet) every two days until a pause at the eight-meter mark to allow the Missing Persons Institute of Bosnia to continue its search, being carried out along a 20-kilometre (12-mile) stretch of the river.
Survivors say the bodies of many Muslims from the nearby town of Visegrad were thrown into the river by Bosnian Serb forces during their brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing at the start of the war in 1992.
The Bosnian institute as well as Serbian authorities on the other side of the border has searched dozens of kilometers of the river in the past months. But they are under pressure to pick up the pace before the water level is too high for them to continue.
"I think we'll get there if the weather is not too bad," said Samir Sabanija, a Bosnian team official.
"This is a very specific type of terrain. We've never done this before and wondered how to start. It is, after all, a huge mass grave," he said.
The remains found so far include the skeletons of several children, according to a spokeswoman for the Bosnian institute, Lejla Cengic.
Only identification of the bones through DNA analysis will show exactly how many people died here, she said.
The prosecutor at the UN war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia says about "13,000 Muslims were evicted from their homes by force or killed between spring and summer of 1992" in the Visegrad region.
The Missing Person's Institute says nearly 3,000 people died in the town and surrounding villages, of whom 824 are still unaccounted for.
"The Drina is the largest mass grave in the Balkans," said Bakira Hasecic, head of an association of women from the Visegrad area who were raped during the conflict.
She said she witnessed the executions of Muslims on an old bridge in Visegrad that was made famous by Nobel-prize winning novelist Ivo Andric in his book "Bridge over the Drina".
"The corpses of the victims were transported on trucks and dumped in the river," she said.
Witnesses from villages further along the Drina have told the UN war crimes court that in the spring and summer months of 1992, when the brutal ethnic cleansing campaign was at its height, they were fishing bodies out of the water daily.
Bosnia's inter-ethnic war between its Croats, Muslims and Serbs claimed some 100,000 lives.
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