Memici, Bosnia-Herzegovina ? Forensic experts gently placed skulls, bones and clothing into plastic bags Wednesday, the first gathering of remains from what may be Bosnia’s largest mass grave.

Victims’ relatives watched the excavation from behind strips of yellow tape at the site, an area the size of a tennis court on Crni Vrh hill, near the border with Serbia. Once bagged, the remains will be taken for DNA analysis.

The site, opened last week, is believed to contain Muslims killed by Bosnian Serb forces during the country’s 1992-1995 war. Forensic experts digging as deep as 12 feet in some sections found several layers of remains, most of them dismembered.

“This is the 14th mass grave we’ve found this year, and in this case, we are dealing with one that contains a huge number of bodies,” said Murat Hurtic, the head of a regional branch of the Muslim Commission for Missing Persons.

“We can’t say how many bodies the grave contains but we can speak of several hundred,” he said.

As the team lifted bones out one by one, dozens of people whose relatives are missing and presumed dead watched in hope of recognizing clothing, documents or other personal belongings of their loved ones. None was found on Wednesday.

One bystander, Fatima Krehic, a 56-year-old Muslim, was eager for information about her son, husband, or 36 other male family members.

“I lost 38 members of my family that day,” she said, referring to June 1, 1992, when Serb forces took control of her village, Djulici, and carried the men off. “Wherever I look, there is not one male grown person around me to care about me and the children, my orphans.”

After 11 years, the bodies are no longer recognizable. They will be taken to a lab in the northern town of Tuzla for DNA analysis to be matched with that of survivors.

A group of Bosnian Muslim women who lost their fathers and other family members in the beginning of Bosnian war stand at the mass grave site near the eastern Bosnian village of Memici. The grave is believed to contain the remains of several hundred war crimes victims killed during the 1992-1995 war, among them some who died in the 1995 massacre at Srebrenica.

Several women who have shown up every day since July 30, when work at the site began, brought pie, watermelon, juice and other food for the forensic experts.

Work at the grave is expected to last at least two months, Hurtic said. Most of the remains are believed to be those of Muslims from nearby Zvornik and the surrounding villages killed in 1992, the start of the war.

Their bodies are mixed with some of the 8,000 Muslims killed by Serb forces who overran the nearby enclave of Srebrenica in 1995, then under U.N. protection. That massacre is considered the worst atrocity in Europe since World War II.

The grave is a so-called secondary grave, Hurtic explained, where bodies initially buried elsewhere were dumped.

Serb forces moved remains from grave to grave in an attempt to hide bodies from war crime investigators, he said. During removal and reburial, bodies were often torn up by bulldozers, then dumped by truckloads in the new grave.

About 250,000 people died during the war and more than 20,000 remain missing and are presumed dead. Forensic experts have so far exhumed 16,500 bodies from more than 300 mass graves found since the end of the war.