Pathologists Report about Exhumations
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Witness Clark said that the autopsies, which he led, determined that most of the victims were males and that they died due to injuries caused by fire arms.
In most cases those men died due to injuries caused by bullets fired from fire arms. They often had multiple injuries, said Clark, whose team performed autopsies in a morgue in Visoko.
He specified that prior to preparing the three reports and submitting them to the Tribunal, he examined more than 3,000 autopsy reports, bodies and parts of bodies exhumed from mass graves in Podrinje. Those were the graves in Kozluk, Nova Kasaba, Konjevic Polje, Glogova, Ravnice, Zeleni Jadar and a location called Lazete.
General Mladic, former Commander of the Republika Srpska Army, VRS, is charged with genocide against about 7,000 Muslim men and boys from Srebrenica.
During the cross-examination Mladics Defence attorney Miodrag Stojanovic suggested that, in case several bullets were found in a single body, it would indicate that they were exposed to random fire, not an organised shooting.
Clark denied the allegation, saying that, even during a shooting, a single body could be hit several times.
He confirmed that pathologists were not able to determine, after having conducted autopsies, whether the victims received injures while they were still alive or after having died.
The witness accepted attorney Stojanovics suggestion that the autopsies could not determine the time and place of murder of the persons, whose remains were found. He said that it was possible that the bodies had been brought from other locations where the persons had been killed and then buried in mass graves.
The trial of Mladic, who is charged with persecution of Muslims and Croats throughout Bosnia and Herzegovina, which reached the scale of genocide in seven municipalities, terror against civilians in Sarajevo and taking UNPROFOR members hostage, is due to continue on September 24.
