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| BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA: Pit Yields More Corpses |
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2004-08-09 12:59:39 |
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Forensics experts working in suffocating heat in a pit of rotting human flesh have found more than 120 complete bodies of Muslims killed by Serbs in a mass grave in eastern Bosnia, a team leader said on Friday.
The figures change from hour to hour but we expect to find 30 more," said Murat Hurtic of the Commission for Missing Persons of Bosnia's Muslim-Croat federation.
The team had also found 70 incomplete bodies at a lower layer of the grave, Hurtic told Reuters by telephone from the site in a field at Bljecevo.
He said his team was struggling with very high temperatures and bodies literally in pieces, mixed with earth and plastic bags of the former Yugoslav Army.
"It's chaotic. We are working at three meters (10 feet) depth and the temperature in the grave reaches about 50 degrees Celsius (122 degrees Fahrenheit)," he said. "We can barely breath for the gases steaming out from the plastic bags."
The latest mass grave to be excavated is near the Potocari suburb of Srebrenica, scene of Europe's worst atrocity since World War Two in which 7,000 to 8,000 Muslim men and boys were slaughtered in a three-day massacre by the Bosnian Serb Army, under the command of General Ratko Mladic.
Mladic is wanted on charges of genocide by the United Nations war crimes tribunal in The Hague, along with his wartime boss, Bosnian Serb president Radovan Karadzic, who is also still at large.
Hundreds of mass graves have been found across Bosnia since the end of the 1992-95 war, in which some 200,000 people were killed, most of them Muslims, and two million fled their homes.
About 10 percent of the missing remain unaccounted for.
Hurtic said documents found on the bodies showed Bljecevo was a "secondary grave" where victims from two different primary graves were transferred in a bid to cover up the killing.
It contained the corpses of Muslims killed by Bosnian Serb forces in the eastern town of Bratunac early in the war, but it also had remains of victims of the Srebrenica massacre.
The missing persons commission said on Wednesday it had discovered another grave in eastern Bosnia, near the town of Foca, expected to yield the bodies of some 80 Muslims who went missing from the town of Kalinovik in 1992.
So far, some 5,000 victims from the Bosnian conflict have been identified through DNA analysis.
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seeurope.net |
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The Event: SEEF 2004
