The remains of 243 people have been exhumed from a mass grave in northwestern Bosnia, believed to have been inmates of a notorious Serb detention camp during the 1992-95 war, an official said on Wednesday.
”So far we have exhumed 243 bodies, more than half of which were complete,” Commission for Missing People member Jasmin Odobasic said. ”We have also found some 25 documents which indicate that the victims had been inmates of the Omarska camp.”
The bodies were initially buried somewhere else and had been moved to the mass grave in the village of Kevljani, just outside Prijedor. The town was the site of a Serb-run prison camp during the war.
Odobasic said documents found at the site show that prominent citizens of Prijedor, including a professor, a judge, a surgeon and a lawyer, were among the dead. Bullets were also found and some of the bodies had their hands bound with wire.
The exhumations started in August and would continue over the next few days. Several dozens more bodies were expected to be found.
In the early stages of Bosnia’s war thousands of Muslim and Croat civilians in the Prijedor region were captured by Serb forces and held in the Omarska, Trnopolje and Keraterm camps.
Bosnia’s war claimed more than 200 000 lives and left 2,2 million refugees, more than half the Balkan country’s population.
Some 16 000 people, including 3 200 from the Prijedor area, are still listed as missing.
So far some 18 000 bodies have been exhumed from over 300 mass graves throughout the country, most of them Muslims, according to forensic teams. – Sapa-AFP