New Srebrenica mass grave discovered

A mass grave containing the remains of more than 100 victims of the 1995 Srebrenica massacre of Muslims has been found in Bosnia.

The grave, in Snagovo village, about 31 miles north of Srebrenica, was found after forensic experts received a tip-off, said Murat Hurtic, head of Bosnia’s Missing Persons Commission.

It is the seventh mass grave Hurtic’s team has found in Snagovo, where Serb forces buried some of the almost 8,000 victims of Europe’s worst massacre since the Second World War.

“So far we have exhumed 19 whole bodies and 4 incomplete bodies. We have found blindfolds, wires, wallets of the victims of Srebrenica massacre from 1995,” said Alma Dzaferovic, district attorney in charge of genocide crimes.

Local and international experts have been digging for years in Snagovo, finding so-called “secondary” mass graves in the area just outside of the city of Zvornik on the border with Serbia.

Such graves contain bodies originally buried elsewhere, but later moved to the “secondary” location in an effort to cover up the crime. The remains are often only partial, as those involved in reburying them often used bulldozers to bring them up from the first grave.

Bosnian Serbs overran the UN-protected Muslim enclave of Srebrenica near the end of the 1992-95 war. After capturing the eastern town, they summarily killed some 8,000 Muslim men and boys in a few days.

Thousands of Srebrenica victims have been exhumed from over 60 mass graves around the ill-fated town, with more than 2,500 of them having been identified by DNA analysis.

The Srebrenica massacre has led to genocide charges brought by the UN war crimes court in The Hague against several suspects. Two main suspects, Bosnian Serb wartime leader Radovan Karadzic and his army chief Ratko Mladic, remain at large.