As the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) said on Wednesday, the grave was found near the town of Kalinovik, 200 kilometers from Srebrenica. So it is the mass grave that has been discovered “by far” the furthest from Srebrenica.
DNA samples from the site were compared with genetic samples provided by relatives of the victims. The researchers found matches in a total of ten cases. The samples were forwarded to a specialized agency in Bosnia-Herzegovina for official identification.
International courts labeled the execution of more than 8,000 Muslim men by Bosnian Serb forces in Srebrenica in 1995 as “genocide”. The Bosnian-Serb war leader Radovan Karadzic and his army chief Ratko Mladic were both sentenced to life imprisonment by a UN war crimes tribunal, particularly for the massacre in Srebrenica.
According to ICMP’s head of the Western Balkans program, Matthew Holliday, the new grave is just a few kilometers from a village where paramilitaries from the “Scorpio” unit executed six prisoners from Srebrenica in mid-July 1995. Footage of this execution was shown as evidence at international trials.
According to the Srebrenica Memorial Center, more than 90 mass graves of victims of the massacre have been found. The researchers believe that many of the bodies were later dug up from their original mass graves and buried in new locations to cover up the crime. The whereabouts of hundreds of victims is still unclear, but new discoveries of graves are becoming increasingly rare. According to Holliday, the last discovery was made in 2016.
Source: Nachrichten
