Experts exhume bodies of Srebrenica victims

Forensic experts exhumed more than 100 bodies from the sixth mass grave found in a village in eastern Bosnia.

Source: AP

Thursday, 12.10.2006.

11:55

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Experts exhume bodies of Srebrenica victims

The team exhumed 96 complete and 64 incomplete bodies from the mass grave at Krcevine on the border with Serbia. Local and international experts have been digging for years in the area, finding so-called “secondary” mass graves.

“All of the complete bodies had blindfolds on their skulls and we also found bullets mixed with the bodies,” said the head of the government forensic team, Murat Hurtić.

Serb troops in 1995 overran the eastern Bosnian enclave of Srebrenica, which the United Nations had declared a safe zone, and killed as many as 8,000 Muslim men and boys. The victims found in this mass grave were among the 700 Srebrenica men and boys who were gathered together in a school in a nearby village, executed and buried in a mass grave in the nearby village of Grbavci, said Hurtić.

He said information about the site came from a witness who survived the execution.

In order to hide the crime, the perpetrators later reburied the bodies in various other locations – the “secondary” mass graves. Much of the moving was done with bulldozers, which complicates the exhumation and identification process because parts of the same body can be found in two or even three different places.

Forensic teams have been uncovering mass graves throughout Bosnia in recent years, collecting the remains and extracting DNA to be matched with family members. Once a match is found, the body is returned to the family for burial.

Of the 3,500 bodies of Srebrenica victims excavated so far, 2,500 have been identified through DNA and some 2,000 buried in a cemetery in the Srebrenica suburb of Potočari, where the victims were last seen alive.

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