Eurasia Press & News
KAMENICA, Bosnia (Reuters) – Forensic experts said on Wednesday they had unearthed the remains of 362 Muslim victims of the 1995 Srebrenica massacre from a mass grave in eastern Bosnia.
It was the 10th mass grave found in the village of Kamenica, in an area labeled “Death Valley,” that contained the remains of many of about 8,000 Muslim men and boys killed by Bosnian Serb forces as they fled Srebrenica in July 1995.
Murat Hurtic of the regional commission for missing persons said documents recovered at the site showed the victims were from Srebrenica, the eastern enclave that was under United Nations protection when it was overrun by Bosnian Serb forces during the 1992-95 war.
Hurtic said the victims were killed at three locations near Srebrenica and transferred to Kamenica from the original graves three months after the execution.
“The bodies are well preserved because they had lain in clay before being transferred here,” he said, standing on the edge of the muddy grave.
Hurtic said the findings unearthed included 145 complete bodies and 217 incomplete skeletal remains.
Many victims of the Srebrenica massacre were hunted down while running through the woods in small groups and shot.
Bosnian Serbs first buried the bodies near the execution sites but then dug many of them out with bulldozers and re-buried them in so-called “secondary” mass graves, in an attempt to hide the crime.
Experts believe there are more mass graves in the Kamenica area. In 2006, another grave in the valley yielded more than 1,000 body parts, making it the biggest such site in Bosnia.
Former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, who is to go on trial at the U.N. war crimes tribunal in The Hague, and his fugitive military chief Ratko Mladic are both indicted for genocide over the massacre.
About 5,200 victims of Europe’s worst atrocity since World War Two have been identified through DNA analysis so far.
