AFTER his baby girl was abducted by Serbian soldiers at the start of the Bosnian war in 1992, Muhamed Becirovic lost hope of finding her alive.

Now he has been reunited with his daughter Senida by the Red Cross, which used DNA analysis to trace her to a foster family in Serbia. Senida, now called Mila, had been raised as a Serb and a Christian and had no knowledge of her blood relatives or her heritage as a Bosnian Muslim. She faces the dilemma of whether to stay with the family she has always known or to join her natural father, a stranger who lives in Germany.

The Becirovics were torn apart on the first day of the war when, at the age of nine months, Senida was taken along with her mother and four-year-old sister Sanda from their home in the northeastern Bosnian village of Caparde.

Muhamed Becirovic had been working in the nearby town of Tuzla when the conflict broke out. He was unable to return to his wife and daughters as ethnic Serbian troops seized control of the area.

The village remained inaccessible until the end of the war in 1995, by which time Becirovic had been injured and sent to Germany for treatment.

When he returned his home had been demolished and his family had disappeared. Devastated, he returned to Germany where he began to rebuild his life by marrying a local woman and having another daughter. But he continued trying to trace his first family through the International Committee of the Red Cross, hoping at least to find their remains in one of the mass graves around Bosnia.

Finally he received the telephone call that he had never believed would come. “I was suddenly contacted by the Serbian Red Cross officials about an orphan girl who would be my younger daughter’s age and was taken from our area,” he said. “I was told to provide blood for a DNA test and the results showed that she was my daughter Senida.”

Senida travelled to Bosnia last week, where Red Cross officials were helping her to obtain documents under her real name. But the Becirovics’ story may not have a fairy-tale ending. Senida, who has grown up in Belgrade, is staying with an aunt but wants to return to Serbia and her friends to continue her education.

“Of course I am very happy to have found my family and my roots. But at the moment it is all too much for me,” she said. “I don’t want to go to Germany or any other foreign country. I am definitely not ready for all this.”

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