Mass Grave Of More Than 100 Muslims Found In Eastern Bosnia

by Sabina Niksic
SARAJEVO, Aug 10 (AFP) - Forensic experts in Bosnia Tuesday investigated a site believed to contain the remains of more than 100 Muslim civilians Serb forces killed during last decade's war, the latest of grisly finds recalling the conflict.
"We expect to find over one hundred bodies of victims from (nearby towns) of Foca, Jelec and Miljevina," said the head of the Commission for Missing People Amor Masovic. More than 600 people from those towns are still missing nearly nine years after the end of the war.
Some bodies were believed to be those of inmates of the notorious prison camp run by the Serbs in Foca during the war, Masovic told AFP.
Meanwhile, officials said they had exhumed more than 200 bodies and remains of bodies from another grave over the past month, with up to a third of them believed to be victims of the Srebrenica massacre, Europe's worst post-World War II atrocity.
"We exhumed here 132 completed bodies and 102 incomplete human remains," Murat Hurtic of the Bosnian Commission for Missing People said, referring to a grave found in July in a field in the village of Bljeceva.
The bodies appear to have been initially buried somewhere else and moved to the site to cover up the crime, he told AFP.
The complete bodies were believed to have been people from the eastern town of Bratunac, executed by Bosnian Serb forces at the beginning of war in the former Yugoslav republic.
The remains were found in bodybags of the type used exclusively by the Belgrade-controlled Yugoslav People's Army (JNA) during the war.
Bosnian Serbs backed by the JNA seized mainly Muslim eastern Bosnia, including Bratunac, and persecuted its non-Serb residents, forcing Muslims and Croats to flee.
Experts have also found identification documents among the incomplete remains belonging to people executed in Srebrenica in July 1995.
"We believe that at least one third of the victims found in this grave are from Srebrenica, but we will not know for sure before the DNA analyses are completed," Hurtic said.
More than 7,000 Muslim men and boys were murdered in Srbrenica just a few days after Serb forces overran the isolated eastern enclave controlled by the mainly Muslim Bosnian army.
Bosnia's war claimed more than 200,000 lives and left 2.2 million refugees, more than half of the country's population. Some 25,000 people are still reported missing.
So far some 18,000 bodies have been exhumed from over 300 mass graves throughout the country, most of them Muslims, according to forensic teams.
Bosnia's largest known mass grave, near Zvornik in the east, contained the remains of 629 people believed to have been Muslim civilians who were executed when Bosnian Serb forces captured the area at the outset of the war.
Numerous mass burial sites that had been found in Bosnia were so-called "secondary" graves where Bosnian Serbs brought bodies from other locations to cover up the crimes.
Such graves contain skeletons crushed by bulldozers.
The identification of victims from the secondary mass graves had been an almost impossible task prior to the introduction of DNA testing which includes a sophisticated database matching victims' DNA with that from blood samples of living relatives.