A gruesome video of Serb paramilitary soldiers murdering six Bosnian Muslim youths near Srebrenica in 1995 has led to the immediate arrest of eight suspects.
Serbian prime minister Vojislav Kostunica said the arrests were ordered after the country was shown a "brutal, callous and disgraceful crime against civilians", in a 10-year-old video that came to light this week.
President Boris Tadic went on national television to tell Serbs the pictures were proof of the "monstrous" crimes committed in Serbia's name during the Yugoslav wars - crimes for which many senior Serbs are already convicted or on trial by The Hague tribunal.
"Those seen in these pictures committing murder were free men until yesterday. They were walking our streets," a visibly shaken Mr Tadic said on state television. They must face justice, he added.
The graphic film was shot near the town whose name now recalls the worst massacre in Europe since World War Two, in which 8,000 Muslim men and boys were killed over several days and their bodies bulldozed into mass graves.
It was shown by the prosecution during the war crimes trial of former Serbian autocrat Slobodan Milosevic in The Hague on Wednesday.
It was the first such graphic material from the massacre in Srebrenica to be shown in Serbia, where over half of the population refuses to believe the massacre even took place, according to a poll in May.
It began with a Serb Orthodox priest blessing the camouflaged paramilitary troops in a boot camp in Bosnia.
The grim scenes of battered and terrified young men going to their deaths were later broadcast on the evening news by at least two Serbian television channels, including state television RTS.
Srebrenica was a United Nations-designated "safe area" in 1995, but it was overrun by Bosnian Serb forces who pushed lightly armed Dutch troops aside. Its starving population was sorted out for execution and the males were led away.
The prime suspects in the Srebrenica massacre are Bosnian Serb commander Ratko Mladic and his political leader Radovan Karadzic.
The United Nations war crimes court is demanding their arrest before Bosnia has to face the Srebrenica massacre, but there are not signs that the pair are any closer to capture. They are still on the run almost 10 years after it occurred.