New Srebrenica mass grave found in Bosnia

The new grave is the 11th to be discovered in the tiny village of Kamenica, near the town of Zvornik, said Murat Hurtic of Bosnia’s Missing Persons Commission.

 

"We have exhumed remains of one person and 38 detached skeleton parts," he told AFP adding that bullets were also found in the grave.

 

Hurtic said the exact number of bodies could be established only after DNA analyses.Â

 

"We are absolutely sure that these remains belong to Srebrenica victims," he said.

 

The exhumation work was expected to continue till the end of next week.

 

Soil probes showed there were at least two more graves in the village.

 

Serb forces overran the then U.N.-protected Muslim enclave of Srebrenica in the final phase of Bosnia’s 1992-1995 war, summarily killing some 8,000 Muslim men and boys in Europe’s single worst atrocity since World War II.

 

The victims were initially buried in a dozen mass graves. But after the release of satellite pictures showing large portions of freshly disturbed ground, Serbs moved them to other locations in order to cover up the crimes.

 

The body parts were separated during reburial using bulldozers, and forensic experts have sometimes found parts of a single person buried in three different so-called secondary graves.

 

The remains of thousands of the victims have been exhumed from about 70 mass graves around the ill-fated town, with more than 5,600 people identified by DNA analysis.

 

The Srebrenica massacre remains the only episode in the Balkan conflicts of the 1990s to have been ruled genocide by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the International Court of Justice, both based in The Hague.

 

Wartime Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic was arrested in Belgrade in July after being on the run for more than a decade since the ICTY charged him over genocide and crimes against humanity for atrocities including the Srebrenica massacre.

 

Karadzic’s army commander and co-accused in the genocide case, General Ratko Mladic, remains at large.