Bosnia Discovers Two Wartime Mass Graves

The prosecutor’s office said on Tuesday that a mass grave containing the remains of several war victims has been found in Bratunac in eastern Bosnia and another containing ten bodies is being exhumed in Bihac in the north-west.

It said that it was unable to state exactly how many victims were found in Bratunac because the remains were incomplete.

Lejla Cengic, the spokesperson for the Bosnian Missing Persons Institute, told BIRN that the remains were scattered across the ground in six different locations and that they are “very fragmented”.

“According to our data, these are remains that belong to victims of Bosniak nationality who were killed here after the fall of Srebrenica in July 1995. This area was [previously] inaccessible because of land mines, but a Norwegian organisation helped with the demining process,” said Cengic.  

The remains will be transferred to the Commemorative Centre in Tuzla for DNA analysis and identification. Cengic added that remains of six other war victims were found in the same area last year.

The prosecution also said that a mass grave exhumation was underway at the Humci cemetery in Bihac, where the remains of ten victims have been found.

“An exhumation process is being carried out since there are indictors that in this area there are victims whose death was brought on by war crimes. The exhumation will continue in the next few days and is expected to end by the end of the week,” said the prosecution in a statement.

Cengic said that the exhumation was being carried out in a part of the cemetery which has unmarked graves, and it is believed that the victims are of various ethnicities.

“After the exhumation, we are taking DNA samples from the bones, but the remains are being returned to the same grave sites, where they will remain until we find a match,” she said.

There are still several thousand missing people whose bodies have not been found since the end of the 1992-95 conflict in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Despite the years that have passed since the war, mass graves have continued to be discovered. One of the biggest was found in 2013 in the Tomasica mines near Prijedor, where the remains of more than 400 victims were exhumed.