Bosnian Mortuaries Hold 2,000 Unidentified War Remains

The Institute for Missing Persons told BIRN that it has conducted a review at each of the country’s 12 mortuaries and ossuaries, and found that 2,000 pieces of human remains are yet to be identified.

The review process managed to identify the remains of 115 people, and link 948 remains to people who have already been identified.

Lejla Cengic, spokesperson for the Institute for Missing Persons, said it was also possible that some of the remains could be those of victims who died during the First or Second World Wars.

“A certain number of victims could not be identified because no DNA samples of blood were available for comparison,” Cengic said.

She also said that it was possible that there might have been some misidentifications in the cases of some of the 8,129 victims who have been identified through recognition so far.

“At present blood samples are being collected from relatives who identified the remains of their family members through the classic method [recognition] without giving blood samples. The collected blood will be compared to the 2,000 unidentified mortal remains kept in the morgues and memorial ossuaries,” Cengic explained.

Mistaken identifications can cause further problems for the entire process, she added.

“On one hand, those who have identified remains incorrectly have the wrong skeletons buried under the wrong names, while on the other hand, families searching for their missing members cannot find them because they have already been buried under incorrect names,” Cengic said.

The bodies of around 7,000 people who went missing in Bosnia and Herzegovina during the war are still being sought.