Hundreds of remains found at Bosnia mass grave as exhumation starts

SARAJEVO, Aug 6 (AFP) - Forensic experts have found several hundred skeletons after 10 days of digging up a mass grave in eastern Bosnia that could be the largest burial site from the Bosnian war, an official said Wednesday.

"According to the mass grave's depth we are sure that a few hundred skeletons are buried there," Murat Hurtic, a member of the Bosnian Muslim commission for missing people, said.

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Since July 28 the experts have been at work unearthing a four-by-40 meter (13-by-130 feet) large and three meter (10 feet) deep block of human remains located in the mountainous countryside near the eastern town of Zvornik, close to the border with Serbia.

"We have started removing skeletons this morning," Hurtic told AFP from the site thought to contain around 500 bodies of civilians from Zvornik, as well as victims of the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, Europe's worst post-World War II atrocity.

Twenty-one complete skeletons and ten detached parts had been exhumed Wednesday, he said adding that the work in the area known as Crni Vrh, or Black Peak, some 80 kilometers (50 miles) northeast of Sarajevo, are expected to last up to two months.

Preliminary examination of the skeletons at the top of the grave there are at least five women and three children under 14, Hurtic said, adding that some of the skulls had bullet holes.

Experts found some personal documents of the victims showing that they were Muslim civilians from Zvornik executed when Serb forces captured the town at the outbreak of 1992-95 war.

The town's 1,500 residents are still missing following the Serbs' notorious campaign of ethnic cleansing during the war that claimed over 200,000 lives. Some 350 bodies have been found in mass graves in the Zvornik region.

"We still do not know if we would find Srebrenica victims as we dig deeper, " he added.

Some 7,000 Muslim men and boys are believed to have been summarily executed after Serb forces took over the UN-protected enclave of Srebrenica in July 1995.

The Zvornik site is a so-called "secondary" grave where Bosnian Serbs brought bodies from other sites in order to cover up their crimes.

It contains skeletons that had been crushed by bulldozers, which makes identification and even determining the exact number of victims very difficult. DNA analysis would be the only tool to do such a job.

The exhumation is expected to reveal the fate of at least some of the more than 17,000 people still missing in the former Yugoslav republic, nearly eight years after the conclusion of the war, thought to have left about 200,000 people dead.

Experts from the commission have so far exhumed the remains of more than 17, 000 bodies from more than 300 mass graves in Bosnia.

Bosnian Serb wartime leader Radovan Karadzic and his army commander Ratko Mladic, indicted for genocide and war crimes by the Hague-based UN tribunal, are still at large.

Former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic is on trial at The Hague on more than 60 charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity for his role in the 1990s wars in Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo. For the war in Bosnia he faces a separate charge of genocide.

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