Bosnian forensic experts recovered remains of three dozen people in a mass grave covered with coal mine waste on Tuesday and said it might hold many hundreds of Muslims missing from the area for 12 years.
"These victims are men and clothes and shoes found inside indicate that they are civilians," said Amor Masovic, head of the Commission for Missing People of Bosnia's Muslim-Croat federation, whose team led the exhumation work.
PHOTO: REUTERS
"According to our information, they are inmates from the notorious KP Dom prison and inhabitants of Foca, Miljevina and [the nearby village] Jelec killed in April and May of 1992. Inmates were killed in September and October," Masovic said.
About 1,500 Muslims in the ethnically mixed municipality of Foca, some 40km southeast of Sarajevo, went missing at the start of Bosnia's 1992-1995 war in the first wave of "ethnic cleansing" by Serb forces, ex-Yugoslav army and paramilitaries.
About 600, including more than 300 inmates from the KP Dom detention camp in Foca, remain unaccounted for, according to figures from a Sarajevo institute investigating war crimes. Twenty-eight bodies were found in a mass grave nearby last week.
Another commission team completed work on a separate mass grave in eastern Bosnia on Tuesday. That group found 132 complete and 102 incomplete bodies of Muslims killed in Bratunac in 1992 and in the 1995 Srebrenica massacre of 8,000 people.
The Hague-based UN war crimes tribunal for former Yugoslavia has convicted several Serbs for crimes committed in the Foca area. Others are awaiting trial or are at large.
The commission team found 35 bodies about 2m below the surface after two days of work at a small section of the waste disposal site of the coal mine in Miljevina, near Foca.
Court officials, forensic experts and workers sifted through well preserved human bones and skulls, clothes and shoes after a mechanical digger removed the upper layer of earth from a 100m2 section of the plateau.
"At this micro-location of the site we expect to find about 60 bodies, but the total area we are going to search covers the size of 10 soccer fields," Masovic said, but added it was difficult to say how many victims might be found in the end.
He said spent bullet casings found in the grave indicated that some victims were killed at the site.
Avdo Zametica and his wife Zubejda, who returned to Jelec after the war, hope the excavations will uncover news about the fate of their twin sons.
After capture by Serb forces and detention at several locations, witnesses told them the brothers were last seen in mid-September 1992 in KP Dom, when they were told to pack their things and prepare for a prisoner exchange.
"Every day that passes by is more and more difficult," Zubejda said sobbing, sitting in front of their half-rebuild house in the village.
Western peace officials say punishing perpetrators for crimes committed in a war in which 200,000 people, mostly Muslims, were killed and finding thousands of missing people is one of the main conditions for reconciliation.
Of almost 29,000 people missing since the war more than 17,000 have been found and more than 12,000 identified.
But in Foca, often called a "black spot", this process is slow. It had a population of close to 40,000 before; Muslims made up a slight majority but only 3,500 have since returned to rural areas.
PARLIAMENT CHAOS: Police forcibly removed Brazilian Deputy Glauber Braga after he called the legislation part of a ‘coup offensive’ and occupied the speaker’s chair Brazil’s lower house of Congress early yesterday approved a bill that could slash former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro’s prison sentence for plotting a coup, after efforts by a lawmaker to disrupt the proceedings sparked chaos in parliament. Bolsonaro has been serving a 27-year term since last month after his conviction for a scheme to stop Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva from taking office after the 2022 election. Lawmakers had been discussing a bill that would significantly reduce sentences for several crimes, including attempting a coup d’etat — opening up the prospect that Bolsonaro, 70, could have his sentence cut to
China yesterday held a low-key memorial ceremony for the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) not attending, despite a diplomatic crisis between Beijing and Tokyo over Taiwan. Beijing has raged at Tokyo since Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi last month said that a hypothetical Chinese attack on Taiwan could trigger a military response from Japan. China and Japan have long sparred over their painful history. China consistently reminds its people of the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, in which it says Japanese troops killed 300,000 people in what was then its capital. A post-World War II Allied tribunal put the death toll
‘UNWAVERING ALLIANCE’: The US Department of State said that China’s actions during military drills with Russia were not conducive to regional peace and stability The US on Tuesday criticized China over alleged radar deployments against Japanese military aircraft during a training exercise last week, while Tokyo and Seoul yesterday scrambled jets after Chinese and Russian military aircraft conducted joint patrols near the two countries. The incidents came after Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi triggered a dispute with Beijing last month with her remarks on how Tokyo might react to a hypothetical Chinese attack on Taiwan. “China’s actions are not conducive to regional peace and stability,” a US Department of State spokesperson said late on Tuesday, referring to the radar incident. “The US-Japan alliance is stronger and more
FALLEN: The nine soldiers who were killed while carrying out combat and engineering tasks in Russia were given the title of Hero of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea North Korean leader Kim Jong-un attended a welcoming ceremony for an army engineering unit that had returned home after carrying out duties in Russia, North Korean state media KCNA reported on Saturday. In a speech carried by KCNA, Kim praised officers and soldiers of the 528th Regiment of Engineers of the Korean People’s Army (KPA) for “heroic” conduct and “mass heroism” in fulfilling orders issued by the ruling Workers’ Party of Korea during a 120-day overseas deployment. Video footage released by North Korea showed uniformed soldiers disembarking from an aircraft, Kim hugging a soldier seated in a wheelchair, and soldiers and officials
RSS