BANJA LUKA, Bosnia-Hercegovina -- Although Bosnia's 1992-95 war ended almost seven years ago, NATO peacekeepers say that almost every house here seems to possess some wartime weapon.

When searching houses NATO-led Stabilization Force (SFOR) soldiers usually find illegal rifles and pistols, as well as hand grenades, ammunition, sometimes even explosive.

All this despite calls for a safe environment, especially for the sake of children who might come across the stashes.

"Everyone seems to have weapons. Or not every, but there seems that a vast proportion of the population either has a weapon or knows where a weapon is," Major Alex Macintosh told AFP.

In the four-and-a-half-months since he and his unit of Welsh guards have been based in the SFOR military base near the Bosnian Serb town of Banja Luka, no large weapons hides were found. "All the weapons that we've found have been in people's houses or (their) out-buildings," he said. In this period of time, SFOR found 46,000 rounds of ammunition in Banja Luka and the region alone, "which might just hint towards how vast the issue of weapons and ammunition is."

During a door-to-door search attended by a AFP journalist in Laus, an urban suburb of Banja Luka, 66-year-old Bosnian Serb Dusan was discovered to be hiding a rifle in a cupboard in his bedroom.

When SFOR soldiers knocked at his door and asked him whether he had any piece of weaponry he admitted he had an illegal weapon in the house, but somehow he forgot who gave it to him during the war, he said.

"I have no idea who brought it and gave it to me," Dusan added.

"They usually put blame on their friends or someone else," said Richard Brewer, an SFOR soldier.

The operation was part of a Bosnia-wide project dubbed "harvest", launched in 1998 to collect all wartime weapons.

Another Bosnian Serb who refused to give his name swore to SFOR that he had no weapons in his house. Soldiers started to search the house and outside found a few hand-grenades and incendiary ammunition.

Weapons were under the stairs on reach of his two small children, of whom one was just learning how to walk. "How that got there? I do not know. It must have been that someone had put it there", he told SFOR soldiers, taken by surprise.

"Yesterday we found in a house 37 kilos of explosives, together with fuse and other things needed to have it work," Sgt. Brian Nicholls said. If that had exploded it would have blow up the whole suburb, he added.