Visiting Malaysian King Tuanku Syed Sirajuddin and his wife met on Sunday with survivors of the 1995 massacre of 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica.

"We are simply speechless. We do not know how to express our sorrow," the king said, addressing around 50 Srebrenica women who lost their loved ones in the eastern Bosnian town.

"To us this is a historic event. It's a sign that 11 years after, we are not alone," said Munira Subasic, head of an association of Srebrenica women who lost their husbands and sons in the atrocity.

The royal couple, who arrived for a three-day private visit to Bosnia on Friday, donated US$10,000 to the association.

Subasic presented them with gifts of handicraft items made by the Srebrenica women while they were grieving their lost loved ones.

When accepting the gifts Queen Tuanku Fauziah, moved by the Srebrenica women's attention, burst out crying while the king too fought back tears.

Bosnian Serbs captured the UN-protected Muslim enclave of Srebrenica in July 1995, near the end of Bosnia's 1992-1995 war.

A few days after taking the town, they summarily killed some 8,000 Muslim males, in the worst single atrocity in Europe since World War II.

The Srebrenica massacre has been deemed an act of genocide by the UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague.

Malaysia's king has largely ceremonial duties and acts on the advice of the cabinet, but he is the Islamic leader in a number of Malaysian states and also heads the military under the constitution.

Some 40 percent of Bosnia's 3.8 million inhabitants are Muslims. Around 31 percent are Serbs, who are mainly Orthodox Christian, and 10 percent are Croats, who are mostly Catholics.