Bosnia's biggest mass grave uncovered
The bodies of more than 1,000 victims of the 1995 Srebrenica massacre have been exhumed from Bosnia’s biggest mass grave, forensic experts said today.
Experts began digging in June in the vicinity of the eastern Bosnian village of Kamenica, near the border with Serbia, where they previously had found eight other mass graves.
From this grave, the team exhumed 144 complete and 1,009 partial skeletons.
“This is the largest mass grave so far found in Bosnia-Herzegovina,” said Murat Hurtic, head of the forensics team.
The remains were heavily damaged as is typical of “secondary” mass graves in which victims’ bodies are moved by the perpetrators from the original burial site in an attempt to hide the crime.
This often was done with bulldozers, which complicates the identification process because parts of the same body are found in two or even three different mass graves.
Along with the remains, experts found 14 documents indicating the victims were killed in the Srebrenica massacre, Europe’s worst mass execution since the Second World War.
Of the 3,500 bodies of Srebrenica victims excavated so far, 2,500 have been identified through DNA.
