Image:The memorial cemetery Potocari, outside Srebrenica, for victims of Srenbrenica genocide (Image: (AP Photo/Sulejman Omerbasic)

Serbian prosecutors have made the first arrests in connection with the 1995 Srebrenica massacre.

Eight suspects were today arrested following a war crimes investigation into the massacre that saw 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men murdered by Serbian forced in the town of Srebrenica in Bosnia.

Reuters reports that the men stand accused of the execution of more than 1,000 people at a warehouse just outside Srebrenica.

The UN has ruled that the killing at Srebrenica constitutes genocide.

"This is the first such case involving people directly suspected of taking part in the Srebrenica massacre," Bruno Vekaric, Serbia's deputy war crimes prosecutor, said to Reuters.

Seven of the men were arrested early on Wednesday, with an eighth being arrested later in the day. Mr Vekaric says there remain an additional five suspects at large.

"There are another five suspects still at large in the region, we are after them as well," he said.

The units are reported to be former members of a Bosnian Serb interior minister unit, and include the unit commander Nedeljko Milidragovic, a man known as ‘Nedjo the Butcher’.

An official involved in the investigation told Reuters that Milidragovic and the other suspects are believed to have brought “some 15 busloads of men from a prison camp in Srebrenica to Kravica, where they were summarily executed."

"They were first shot and then hand grenades were thrown," the official said.