Icetruck.tv News Blog
Technology

AP PHOTOS: Many Bosnian war victims still unidentified

WireAP_b759742020cf4ba680edbf043b5d4b00_12x5_992

AP PHOTOS: Many Bosnian war victims still unidentified

The Associated Press
FILE – In this Thursday, July 25, 2002, file picture, a group of Bosnian Muslim villagers look at the remains of bodies exhumed from a mass grave in the village of Kamenica, Bosnia. As a U.N court prepares to hand down its verdict in the case against Ratko Mladic, the Bosnian Serb military leader during the Balkan country's 1992-5 war, the remains of numerous victims of genocide and war crimes of which he stands accused still await identification. (AP Photo/Amel Emric, File)

    It's been 22 years since Bosnia's bloody 1992-95 war ended, yet the remains of numerous victims of genocide and war crimes still await identification.

    Forensic anthropologist Dragana Vucetic spends her working hours in a forensic facility in the northern town of Tuzla collecting DNA samples from the bones of people killed in eastern Bosnia during the war, including in the notorious 1995 Srebrenica massacre, and reassembling their skeletal remains.

    A U.N court will hand down its verdict Wednesday in the case against Ratko Mladic, who led Bosnian Serb forces in their quest to dismember Bosnia, carve out an "ethnically pure" Serb territory and unite it with neighboring Serbia. Mladic was on the ground with his troops when they overran Srebrenica in July 1995 and proceeded to hunt down and slaughter around 8,000 Muslim Bosnian men and boys. He was charged with genocide for his role in the massacre.

    Throughout the war, Serb soldiers had been throwing their victims' bodies in mass graves. In Srebrenica, they first dumped them in several large pits and then moved them with trucks and bulldozers to over 90 smaller clandestine mass burial sites attempting to hide the massacre.

    When the search for the war missing began, it wasn't unusual for the remains of one Srebrenica victim to be found scattered between several different mass graves, sometimes miles apart.

    Vucetic's employer, the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP), has pioneered a DNA-based system to identify the remains. Through their efforts, over 70 percent of the estimated 30,000 persons missing from the Bosnian war have so far been accounted for. The figure includes nearly 7,000, or almost 90 percent, of the victims of Srebrenica.

    • Star

    Add Interests Customize your news feed by choosing the topics that interest you.

    To save your interests across all devices Log In or Sign Up &raquo
    Source – abcnews.go.com

    Leave a Comment