New mass grave discovered in Bosnia
Forensic scientists have recovered the remains of 482 victims of the 1995 Srebrenica massacre from a mass grave in northeastern Bosnia.
The leader of the forensic team, Murat Hurtic, said on Monday that of the hundreds of sets of remains found, only eight were complete, indicating the victims’ bodies had been moved from one site to another in an attempt to hide them.
The remains of another 1000 people have been found in four other mass graves in Liplje, Hurtic said.
The identification process was difficult, he said, because an individual’s remains could be scattered in as many as three different sites.
“We actually cannot say exactly how many people were buried in this grave. Experts will now start examination of bones found in all five sites and try to reassemble as many skeletons as possible,” Hurtic said.
He said the dead were among the thousands killed in Srebrenica in Europe’s worst massacre since the second world war.
Mass graves
In 1995, Serb troops overran the eastern Bosnian enclave, which had been declared a safe zone by the United Nations, and killed as many as 8000 Muslim men and boys.
Over the years, UN and local forensic scientists in Bosnia have exhumed 16,500 bodies from more than 300 mass graves.
Thousands of people remain missing and are presumed dead after the 1992-95 Bosnian war.
About 260,000 people were killed and 1.8 million driven from their homes during the fighting, which pitted Bosnia’s Muslims, Catholic Croats, and Orthodox Serbs against one another.