About 6,000 Muslims and Croats were held in Omarska, a former mining complex 20 kilometres (12 miles) from the Bosnian town of Prijedor.

Prosecutors at The Hague tribunal say that when Bosnian Serbs took power in the north-west of the country, they tried to create a territory "ethnically cleansed" of non-Serbs.

At Omarska - and smaller camps at Keraterm and Trnopolje, also in northern Bosnia - new arrivals were reportedly beaten with batons and rifle butts, and crammed into stiflingly hot rooms with no beds and meagre sanitary facilities. They were fed a starvation diet.

Although most prisoners were male, several dozen women were kept at Omarska and were forced to mop floors littered with hair and teeth, and stained with blood.

The women were allegedly raped nightly by guards.

There are also accounts of inmates being forced to carry out atrocities on each other.

Interrogations

Prisoners were interrogated between 8am and 6pm.

Inmates told of hearing beatings and screaming and reported seeing dead bodies taken out and left on the ground.

Sometimes, they said, the guards would play music very loudly to drown the screaming.

But not everyone believed the accounts to be true.

British magazine Living Marxism claimed that the British TV broadcaster ITN had used camera angles and editing to create the barbed wire images of the Trnopolje camp. ITN sued for libel and won the case.