Remains of hundreds of Srebrenica victims unearthed from BiH mass grave

17/10/2005

The remains of 482 victims of the 1995 Srebrenica massacre have been unearthed from the third-biggest mass grave found in BiH so far. Forensic experts completed exhumations at the site on Sunday.

(Reuters, AFP, FENA - 16/10/05; AP, AFP, Reuters - 04/10/05)

Dozens of mass graves containing the remains of the Srebrenica victims have been found in eastern Bosnia and Herzegovina in the past nine years. [AFP]

Forensic experts have recovered the remains of 482 victims of the 1995 Srebrenica massacre from a mass grave in northeastern Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH).

"We found eight complete and 474 incomplete bodies," Murat Hurtic of BiH's Missing Persons Institute said Sunday (16 October), announcing the completion of one month of exhumations at the site in the village of Liplje, about 30km from Srebrenica.

The grave is said to be the third largest found in BiH since the end of the 1992-1995 conflict. It is also the largest among the five so-called secondary mass graves found in Liplje, meaning that the victims were originally buried elsewhere. The bodies were later exhumed with a bulldozer and reburied at a different location in an attempt to cover up the crime.

"It is impossible to say how many people were buried in this grave," Hurtic told the AFP. "Experts will now start examination of the bones found in all five sites in order to reassemble as many skeletons as possible."

Exhumations at the other four mass graves found earlier in Liplje have yielded the remains of a total of about 1,000 people.

Over several days following the fall on 11 July 1995 of the UN "safe area" of Srebrenica to forces led by wartime Bosnian Serb military commander Ratko Mladic, some 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were summarily executed in what has been described as the single worst atrocity in Europe since the end of World War II. Mladic and former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic have been indicted by the UN war crimes tribunal, in part for their role in the events at Srebrenica. Both are in hiding.

The remains of some 16,500 people have been exhumed from over 300 mass graves discovered across the country over the past decade. Several dozen of the graves have contained the remains of Srebrenica victims. Over 2,000 people have been identified through DNA analysis. But thousands of others are still unaccounted for and are believed dead.

A report released earlier this month by a special commission on the 1995 slaughter said some 25,000 people were involved in the capture of Srebrenica. Of them, more than 19,000 Bosnian Serbs, including army, defence ministry and interior ministry personnel, were said to have participated in the killings.