430 BODIES EXHUMED FROM BOSNIA MASS GRAVE, EXPECTED MORE

“Tomasica is near Prijedor, which was a site of horrific crimes against humanity committed by Christian Orthodox Serbs against Muslim Bosniaks and Catholic Croats. Many of the victims were killed in one of the three Nazi-style concentration camps Serb authorities had set up near Prijedor.” – Daily Mail

Forensic experts have exhumed 430 bodies so far from a mass grave left over from the 1992-1995 Bosnian war, possibly the largest gravesite found in Bosnia-Herzogivina, officials said Thursday. That number, already far more than authorities expected, is expected to rise and could even one day surpass the 629 bodies found at Crni Vrh in Srebrenica.

“Remains of 430 victims have been exhumed so far and among them 275 complete bodies,” Lejla Cengic of the Bosnian Institute for Missing People told AFP.

The bodies are believed to be those of Bosniaks and Croats tortured and killed by Bosnian Serb forces in northwestern Bosnia at the beginning of the war.

The grave was discovered in a disused mine in the village of Tomasica in the region of Prijedor. Exhumation started in September with around a dozen bodies being recovered each day.

Bosnian Serbs took control of the Prijedor region in April 1992, forcing non-Serbs to leave their homes. Thousands of people were thrown into concentration camps, where they were held in squalid living conditions, many tortured, and many executed.

The Bosnian Serb mayor of Prijedor, Marko Pavic, on Wednesday visited the gravesite and “expressed his deep remorse for all that had happened and expressed his condolences to families of victims exhumed from the grave,” his office said in a statement.

Associations of victims’ families welcomed the mayor’s visit but expressed doubts as to its sincerity.

“I am not ready to believe in his words of remorse. That is somebody who has insulted victims in the past,” Edin Ramulic of one of Prijedor victims’ associations told AFP.

Pavic had opposed construction of a memorial at the site of a former Bosnian Serb detention camp at Omarska.

The institute’s Mujo Begic said he expects more remains to be found at the Tomasica site, and the bodies are of Bosniak and Croat men, women and children killed in their villages during the war.

“Together with the relocated ones, the number of the bodies here indicates the biggest mass grave so far found in Bosnia,” he said. “We have found some identification documents in the grave, so we know who these people are.”

The grave covers more than 53,820 sq/ft (5,000 sq/m) and is about 30ft (10m) deep.

Most of the victims were killed in their villages and brought to this location to be buried, but teams have also found bullets in the grave which indicates that some were brought here alive and that this was also an execution site, prosecutor Eldar Jahic said, citing evidence and witnesses.

Near the grave, Vahida Behlic, 51, was sobbing as she watched forensic experts dressed in white uniforms and green rubber boots carefully lifting bones from the site, where skeletons were piled on top of each other. She came from Slovenia, where she has lived with her family since she escaped her native village of Zecovi, near Prijedor.

Mrs Behlic came with her husband and son because she thinks one of the skeletons could be of her mother Fatima who was 60 when Serb soldiers came, dragged her out of the basement and shot her in front of her house.

‘I heard the story from a witness who survived because his own grandmother threw herself on him and covered him with her body,’ she said.

A boy back then, the witness arrived in Slovenia injured, where he told her what he saw.

“He said 32 people were killed that day. Standing here, I have the feeling they are watching us from down there.”

The Institute is still searching for 1,200 people from the 3,000 who went missing in the area during the three-year war, which left 100,000 dead. Bosnian war was the first conflict since Second World War to be formally judged genocidal and many key players were subsequently charged with war crimes by the UN’s International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.