LONDON — Prosecutors in Serbia said on Wednesday that eight men suspected of having participated in the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, Europe’s bloodiest slaughter since World War II, had been arrested. The arrests were described by prosecutors as the first by the Serbian police of anyone accused of doing the killing at Srebrenica, where 8,000 Muslims died.

The arrests apparently represented a widening of the prosecution beyond high-level officials and commanders. They also seemed to be part of a Serbian attempt to come to terms with the recent past as the authorities in Belgrade, the capital, pursue membership in the European Union.

Police officers seized the men in several places across Serbia, and prosecutors accused them of killing more than 1,000 Bosnians at a warehouse in Kravica, near Srebrenica — a name that has become a byword in modern European history for genocide.

Bruno Vekaric, Serbia’s deputy war crimes prosecutor, said the case was the first related to people directly involved in the killings.