More Muslim Bodies in Bosnia Mass Graves

“55 complete and 39 incomplete skeletons were exhumed from a mass grave site in the eastern village of Snagovo,” Murat Hurtic, member of the Commission for Missing People told Agence France Presse (AFP) Tuesday, October 26.

He said the victims were Muslims from a group of 720 men who escaped the worst massacre in Europe since World War II — Srebrenica — in July 1995 and were taken to a school in the eastern village of Grbavci, where they were executed by the Bosnian Serb forces.

Bodies were buried somewhere and later were moved to Snagovo to cover up the horrific killings, he noted.

“That’s the reason why some of the bodies are incomplete.”

Children as young as 15 were among the dead, he added.

Some 372 bodies from of Muslim victims had been found in mid September in two mass graves in Bosnia .

Blindfolded

Documents found with the bodies proved that they were victims of the massacre of over 7,000 Muslim males by Serb forces at the eastern town of Srebrenica in 1995, Europe’s worst post-World War II atrocity, Hurtic said.

Hurtic added many of the victims had been blindfolded and bullets found with the remains indicated that they had been shot.

“We have found many bullets and bullet shells. We have even found four bullets in one body,” Reuters quoted Hurtic as saying.

The exhumation works began two weeks ago and are expected to end this week.

Lost Son

The mass grave was discovered by a Muslim returnee Jusuf Hodzic while he was digging land with a cousin to build foundations for a house.

Hodzic and his family were expelled by Orthodox Christian Serb forces during the former Yugoslav republic’s 1992-95 war.

Hodzic said “as I was digging the land, I found a skull and a shirt with glasses in a pocket as well as an Islamic book”.

He informed the NATO-led peace-keeping forces about the mass grave.

Hodzic said one of his sons was killed in the Srebrenica massacre.

“I lost my son, someone else’s sons lie here … It’s hard,” Hodzic told Reuters, his eyes filled with tears.

According to the International Committee of the Red Cross, there are still more than 16,000 people missing from Bosnia ’s war, which claimed more than 200,000 lives. Around 96 percent of the missing are Muslims.

So far, some 18,000 bodies have been exhumed from over 300 mass graves throughout Bosnia, according to forensic teams.

Bosnia ‘s largest known mass grave, near Zvornik in the east, contained the remains of 629 Muslim civilians, who were executed when Bosnian Serb forces captured the area at the outset of the war.

In a landmark ruling, the Appeals Chamber of the UN war crimes tribunal confirmed in April that the 1995 massacre amounted to a “genocide”.

In just a few days following the takeover of Srebrenica by Bosnian Serb forces in July 1995, more than 7,000 Muslim men and boys were summarily executed.

Numerous mass burial sites that had been found in Bosnia were so-called “secondary” graves where Bosnian Serbs brought bodies from other locations to cover up the crimes.

Such graves contain skeletons that had been crushed by bulldozers, which makes identification and even determining the exact number of victims very difficult.

The youngest victim found in a mass grave was a two-day-old Muslim baby and the oldest was a Muslim woman of over 100 years.

Up to 20,000 Bosnian Muslims attend on July 11 a memorial ceremony to commemorate the ninth anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre.