Bulldozers have begun removing layers of soil from a mass grave believed to contain several hundred victims of Bosnia’s war in the 1990s and which could be the largest ever found.
The grave, in mountainous countryside near the eastern town of Zvornik, is thought to contain the bodies of Muslim civilians killed in the 1995 Srebrenica massacre and others killed in Zvornik at the start of the war.
”It could be the largest mass grave ever found in Bosnia,” Amor Masovic, head of the Bosnian Muslim commission for missing people, said as he arrived at the site near the border with Serbia.
Some 20 people, including a forensic expert from the The Hague-based UN war crimes tribunal, were marking the area off with tapes, while two bulldozers removed low plant cover and dirt from the grave.
”It covers an area of four by 49 metres where more than 500 bodies could have been buried,” Masovic said, adding: ”We will be able to release more precise figure later this week once we reach the skeletons and determine the depth of the grave.”
Experts were tipped off two years ago about the site — in an area known as Crni Vrh or Black Peak in the Serb-controlled area of Bosnia — by a person who witnessed the burying of the bodies.
But its discovery was kept secret because of fears it could be disturbed and exhumation work is only now beginning because forensic experts were engaged at other sites.
Some 7 000 Muslim men and boys are believed to have been summarily executed after Serb forces overran the UN-protected enclave of Srebrenica in July 1995 in what is considered the worst atrocity on European soil since World War II.
Many of the victims were buried not once but twice, as the Serbs have removed many of the bodies from their initial resting places in a bid to evade detection. The Zvornik site is one such ”secondary” grave.
Such graves often contain skeletons that have been crushed and compressed into a hole by bulldozers, and body parts which have been jumbled together, which makes identification and even determining the exact number of victims very difficult.
DNA analysis, which is both expensive and long, remains the only reliable tool for the job.
Masovic, who has been working on exhumations for seven years, recalled a case when the pieces of a single skeleton were found in three different mass graves.
More than 200 000 people were killed in the 1992-1995 war in Bosnia, and another 30 000 missing, most of them Muslims.
Experts from the commission have so far exhumed the remains of more than 17 000 bodies from more than 300 mass graves in Bosnia.
Around 11 500 have been identified so far. In the Srebrenica region alone, including Zvornik, the remains of some 6 000 people have been exhumed from 60 mass graves.
Former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic is on trial at The Hague on more than 60 charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity for his role in the 1990s wars in Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo.
For the war in Bosnia he faces a separate charge of genocide. The war crimes tribunal’s two top suspects remain at large.
Bosnian Serb wartime leader Radovan Karadzic and his army commander Ratko Mladic were indicted in 1995 for genocide and war crimes their troops allegedly committed during the Bosnian war, notably in Srebrenica. – Sapa-AFP