Mass grave of Srebrenica victims found

Forensics experts said today they found 78 bodies of victims of the 1995 Srebrenica massacre in a mass grave they believe contains even more remains.

Experts exhumed 43 complete and 35 incomplete bodies from the mass grave in Snagovo, near Zvornik and the border with Serbia, said Murat Hurtic, an official with the missing persons commission in the Muslim-Croat part of Bosnia.

The site may contain up to 100 bodies, Hurtic said.

Based on documents found next to the bodies, the dead appeared to be Bosnian Muslims killed in the 1995 massacre in nearby Srebrenica, the worst slaughter of civilians in Europe since the Second World War. More than 7,000 Muslim men and boys were killed.

“Many of the victims were blindfolded, and we found many small-arms bullets mixed with the bodies,” Hurtic said.

The site was a so-called secondary grave, where bodies initially buried elsewhere were dumped in an effort to hide them. The remains will undergo DNA analysis in an attempt to identify them.

Hurtic said he believed the victims belonged to a group of Srebrenica men who were brought to a school in the nearby village of Grbavci, executed and buried at two different locations. At the end of 1995, they were relocated by the Bosnian Serbs to the mass grave in Snagovo, he said.

Srebrenica was an eastern Bosnian Muslim enclave surrounded by Serb forces throughout the 1992-95 Bosnian war. The enclave was declared a UN “safe haven” for civilians by the Security Council, but that did not prevent Serb troops from overrunning it in July 1995.

The Serbs separated the men from the women and executed thousands in just a few days, UN prosecutors say.

Over the years, UN and local forensics experts in Bosnia have exhumed 16,500 bodies from more than 300 mass graves. Thousands of people remain missing following the war.

Around 250,000 people were killed and 2.2 million driven from their homes during the ethnic conflict, which pitted Bosnia’s Muslims, Croats and Serbs against each other.