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This was “the minimal determined number” of exhumed victims on the basis of a very “conservative estimate”, said Baraybar, who led a Hague Tribunal’s team for determining the sex, age and number of killed people at that time.
Mladic, wartime Commander of the Republika Srpska Army, VRS, is charged with genocide against about 7,000 Srebrenica Bosniaks, whom the VRS shot in the days after it had occupied the United Nations, UN protected enclave on July 11, 1995. Besides that, he is on trial for persecuting Bosniaks and Croats throughout Bosnia and Herzegovina, which reached the scale of genocide in seven municipalities, terrorising citizens in Sarajevo and taking UNPROFOR members hostage.
According to Baraybar’s findings, most of the victims exhumed from the graves were males aged between 13 and 40. However, he mentioned that there were children aged between 8 and 12, as well as women, among the victims.
The witness said that it was not possible to establish a link between the victims and the fall of Srebrenica through an anthropologic examination of exhumed bones, but it was possible to do it on the basis of objects found in mass graves, like personal identification cards or wristwatches.
Mladic’s Defence attorney Miodrag Stojanovic suggested, during the cross-examination, that investigators specified the age categories of victims on the basis of the indictment, which alleged that “Muslim men and boys” had been shot.
Baraybar denied the allegation, saying that he had not even read the indictment against Ratko Mladic prior to the exhumation from the mass graves.
Denying the methods applied by anthropologists, archeologists and other Prosecution’s investigators during the exhumations, attorney Stojanovic said that they even conflicted each other about the methodology.
While confirming that different views existed, Baraybar, however, said that it did not affect the final results of the investigation. At the same time he denied the Defence attorney’s suggestion that the methods applied were not “widely accepted”.
Mentioning that his task was not to determine the time of death of the victims, the Prosecution’s expert in anthropology said that he only indicated that a person died due to being shot by a bullet if he had found a fired bullet underneath the body in the grave.
Opposing an allegation by Defence attorney Stojanovic that he could not say whether the bodies had been brought from some other location and buried in those graves, Baraybar presented a finding, saying that, on most of the exhumed bodies there were no signs indicating that they had began decaying on the ground prior to being buried.
The trial of Mladic is due to continue on Tuesday, September 3.
