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.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver