Bones of 277 exhumed

Sarajevo (Bosnia-Herzegovina), Sept. 25: Remains believed to be those of several dozen victims of the Srebrenica massacre have been exhumed from a mass grave in eastern Bosnia, a forensic expert said on Monday.

"So far we have exhumed 97 complete and 180 incomplete skeletons," Murat Hurtic of Bosnia’s Missing Persons Commission said.

The exhumation of the remains from the site in Kamenica village, near the eastern town of Zvornik, began in mid-August and is expected to continue for at least another week, Mr Hurtic said.

It is the 10th so-called secondary grave found in Kamenica, where Bosnian Serbs brought bodies to cover up the Srebrenica massacre, Europe’s worst atrocity since World War II.

The previously exhumed sites contained over 2,000 bodies from the July 1995 massacre. Serb forces overran the then UN-protected Muslim enclave of Srebrenica in the final phase of Bosnia’s 1992-1995 war, summarily killing some 8,000 Muslim men and boys.

The victims were initially buried in a dozen mass graves.

But after the release of satellite pictures showing large portions of freshly disturbed ground, Serbs moved them to other locations in order to cover up the crimes.

The body parts were separated during reburial using bulldozers, and forensic experts sometimes found parts of a single person buried in three different so-called secondary graves.

—AFP