(changes dateline, updates with detail, witness accounts)

By Maja Zuvela

TRSTJE, Bosnia, May 29 (Reuters) - A Bosnian Croat man shot and killed six of his relatives in a village near the northern Bosnian town of Tuzla on Thursday, gunning down three in their homes and three aboard a bus, police said.

Local people identified the man as 45-year-old Tomislav Petrovic and said all the victims were related to him and lived in the neighbourhood.

"The man has been arrested and an investigation is under way," said Tuzla police spokesman Izudin Saric, adding the victims were three men and three women.

"His motives are not clear."

The shooting is believed to be the worst in the area since the end of the brutal 1992-95 war.

A bus driver shot in the early-morning incident suffered a head wound and was in intensive care in hospital.

Four victims were members of the gunman's extended family, among them his uncle and aunt, neighbours and relatives said. The other two were more distant cousins.

"I heard shots at around 6 a.m. (0400 GMT) and saw Tomislav carrying a gun," said Marjan Petrovic, a member of the extended Petrovic clan, who saw the scene from his window.

"He was coming back from the bus station."

The witness told Reuters Tomislav first went to one house and shot dead a man in the bathroom. He moved on and shot his uncle and his aunt in the courtyard of their home.

Nobody knew the motive for the killings, Marjan Petrovic said, but Tomislav had been a lonely boy who liked guns from his childhood and rarely socialised with other children.

Other villagers said he had behaved strangely and was suffering from depression.

The man had worked in Croatia for years, like many other villagers working abroad to support their families at home. His wife and two children live in the village, as well as his parents and siblings. No one wanted to talk to journalists.

The Tuzla region is part of Bosnia's Muslim-Croat federation, one of the country's two halves along with the Serb Republic. It hosts many thousand Bosnian Muslim refugees from other parts of Bosnia who were displaced in the war. (Additional reporting by Daria Sito-Sucic; Writing by Ellie Tzortzi; Editing by Mary Gabriel)

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