Subsequent Burials

The Defence’s expert in court medicine Dusan Dunjic, in his testimony at Radovan Karadzic’s trial at The Hague, that there is “firm evidence” that only “450 to 500” bodies exhumed from mass graves linked with the fall of Srebrenica in July 1995 were victims of shooting.

As he said, Dunjic came to that conclusion after having reviewed autopsy reports about remains found in mass graves, which were prepared by Prosecution experts.

Dunjic said that, in case a victim’s hands were tied with a hard ligature, wire or rope and that the ligature was still tied around the hands during the exhumation, it was considered “firm evidence” that the person was shot.
“Between 450 and 500 people had such ligatures. As a forensic expert, I can accept that only that number of people was executed. All of the other things, the victims who died from fire arms or shrapnel pieces, absolutely do not point to executions,” Dunjic said.  

Karadzic, former President of Republika Srpska and supreme Commander of its armed forces, is charged with genocide against about 7,000 Muslims from Srebrenica, as well as other crimes in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Dunjic said that the number of victims, who, as determined by Prosecution experts and investigators, were shot, was not correct, but he did not specify which number he had in mind.

According to Dunjic, the Prosecution’s documents, which he had studied, denied the thesis that the persons named on the list of the missing persons linked to Srebrenica, were killed over the course of a ten-day period.

“Not all of them got killed. Some of them were killed much before. I have proved that in my written report,” Karadzic’s expert said.

Explaining the fact that remains of the same persons were found in two different graves, which was also confirmed through a DNA analysis, Dunjic said that those were parts of corpses, which had almost fully decayed on the ground, so they ended up in different graves.

As he said, bodies, which had already decayed were buried subsequently, which means that those people died “much earlier, prior to July 1995”.
According to the charges and previous verdicts, the VRS buried the bodies of shot Muslims in mass graves in the vicinity of scaffolds, exhumed them in the autumn of 1995, transferred and buried them again in secondary graves in an attempt to conceal the crime.

Dunjic also denied the credibility of a Prosecution’s investigation of mass graves linked to Srebrenica, because, as he said, many objects and pieces of evidence found in them were subsequently destroyed.   

The trial is due to continue on July 23.