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Remains of Srebrenica massacre victims found
BRENDAN O'BRIEN
Scotsman.com
10.17.05

FORENSIC experts believe they have uncovered the remains of 482 victims of the Srebrenica massacre in a mass grave in north-eastern Bosnia.
Mura Hurtic, leader of the forensic team, said that the condition of the remains indicated that they had been moved to the grave in the village of Liplje in an attempt to hide them. Of the hundreds of sets of remains uncovered only eight skeletons were intact, he said.

Mura Hurtic said: "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."

The remains of another 1,000 people have been discovered in four other mass graves in the village, according to Hurtic. He went on to say that identifying the remains would be difficult because they had also been disturbed and an individual’s remains could be scattered across different grave sites.

In 1995 Serb soldiers overran the eastern Bosnian enclave of Srebrenica during the Yugoslav civil war killing around 7,000 Muslim men and boys in Europe’s worst massacre since World War II. The town had been declared a safe zone by the UN and was under the protection of a small force of Dutch soldiers. The Dutch government of the time later resigned because the Dutch soldiers did not attempt to stop the massacre.

The UN and local forensic experts have exhumed 16,500 bodies from mass graves since the end of the 1992-1995 civil war; thousands of people are still missing and presumed dead. About 260,000 people are believed to have been killed and 1.8 million driven from their homes in the ethnic conflict between Bosnian Muslims, Catholic Croats and Orthodox Serbs.

Croatian American Association
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Daniella Sumera
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