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.
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to
RSS