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Bodies of Bosnian Muslims Unearthed from Mass Grave
SARAJEVO, June 9 (News Agencies) - Some 13 bodies, believed to be of Muslim civilians killed by Serb forces during the 1992-95 Bosnian war, were exhumed Friday night from a mass grave in northeast Bosnia, state television reported.
Among those exhumed from the grave near the town of Foca, some 100 kilometers (60 miles) north of Sarajevo, were the remains of a child and several women, investigative judge Ibrahim Hadzic, the accompanying Bosnian forensic team said.
Bosnian forensics experts began excavations from a pit in the mountains near Foca in the presence of investigators of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), television said.
The site, which an anonymous Bosnian Serb led investigators to, supposedly contains bodies of some of 400 Muslim civilians killed in the Foca prison, which was turned to a concentration camp after Serb forces overran the city at the outbreak of war.
Some 1,600 people from Foca are still missing, while bodies of some 350 have been exhumed in the vicinity of the city so far.
This comes a few days after Serbian police started exhuming bodies recovered from the Danube River and thought to be Kosovo Muslim Albanians that could link ousted leader Slobodan Milosevic to war crimes.
News agencies had reported that Interior Minister Dusan Mihajlovic told Belgrade radio that the bodies recovered two years ago from a refrigerated truck dumped in the Danube were being exhumed from a mass grave, but did not say where it was. He also suggested there might be more such graves.
Mihajlovic said, without giving details, that there had been attempts to destroy evidence, adding that the ministry would pursue the case to the very end.
The authorities serving under Milosevic hushed up the recovery of the truck filled with bodies, and the story only emerged in April of this year through a local newspaper.
Last month, Serbia's new reformist authorities accused Milosevic and close aides of covering up evidence of possible war crimes against civilians during military operations in Kosovo in 1998-99, saying they had arrived at their conclusions during investigations into the "bodies in the river" case.
Mihajlovic had said that veils worn by some of the women suggested that the victims came from Kosovo, whose population is predominantly Muslim.
The minister said the evidence suggested that the theory promoted by Serb nationalists that Serbs were the only victims of "a dirty and atrocious war fought from Croatia and Bosnia to Kosovo," during the 10-year break-up of former Yugoslavia, was unsustainable.
Last week authorities in Bosnia's Serb republic said they will hand documents to the U.N. war crimes court relating to several cases of Serbs suspected of war crimes during the 1992-95 Serb ethnic-cleansing of Muslims.
The documents, relating to cases which had been investigated by the Serb military courts, will be the first against Serb war crimes suspects to be officially given to the ICTY in The Hague.
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