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Exhumation Completed, Hundreds of Muslim Bodies Found in Bosnia
SARAJEVO, Aug 28
(IslamOnline & News Agencies) - A total of 343 bodies believed to be of Bosnian Muslims executed by Serb forces after the massacre at Srebrenica in 1995 have been exhumed from a mass grave in the village of Glogova, a Bosnian official said Tuesday.
The grave, located 10 miles northwest of Srebrenica, was originally found last year by investigators of the U.N. war crimes tribunal, who at the time exhumed 119 bodies.
Over the past six weeks the Muslim-led Commission for Missing Persons' forensic team has exhumed another 224 bodies from the grave, said its chief, Amor Masovic.
He said the commission believed they were the remains of Srebrenica Muslims shot dead by Bosnian Serbs in the nearby village of Kravice in July 1995. The bodies were then buried in Glogova, said Masovic.
"A number of bullets and cartridges were found with the remains," he added. The remains have been transferred to a morgue facility in the northern town of Tuzla.
Since the end of the 1992-95 Bosnian war, more than 4,000 remains have been exhumed around Srebrenica, most of them from 20 mass graves in the area.
Srebrenica, located in eastern Bosnia, was the site of Europe's worst atrocity since World War II.
Up to 8,000 Muslims are believed to have been massacred after Bosnian Serb forces overran what was supposed to be a safe U.N. enclave in July 1995.
Earlier this month, the International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia (ICTY) sentenced Serb army general Radislav Krstic to 46 years imprisonment for genocide linked to the Srebrenica massacre - the first conviction for genocide by the tribunal, and the longest sentence handed down so far.
Three other Bosnian Serb army officers - Dragan Jokic, Vidoje Blagojevic and Dragan Obrenovic - are in detention in The Hague facing war crimes charges over the massacres.
Former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic and his army commander Ratko Mladic, both indicted by the U.N. court for genocide and warcrimes, are still at large, and are believed to be hiding in the Bosnian Serb entity of Republika Srpska (RS), a territory carved out after the signing of the Dayton peace accords in 1996.
Former speaker of the Bosnian Serb assembly Momcilo Krajisnik, a past ally of Karadzic, was denied temporary release Tuesday by the tribunal.
"The Chamber doesn't have the conviction that the accused will appear in front of the judges," a judge said, agreeing with prosecutors that Krajisnik constituted an escape risk.
Krajisnik had asked to be granted leave to attend a memorial service for his father in Pale, east of Sarajevo.
Prosecutors presented Krajisnik as an escape possibility, considering the fact that NATO officials had to arrest him after he refused to turn himself in voluntarily.
Republika Srpska offered to provide 24-hour surveillance of Krajisnik's leave, but tribunal prosecutor Mark Harmon accused the RS of being a "sanctuary for the accused."
"Not one accused has yet been arrested by the RS," he added.
Krajisnik is one of the two highest-level politicians detained by the ICTY to date.
The other is Biljana Plavsic, former president of the RS.
The two have been charged with genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes for their role in the ethnic cleansing of non-Serbs (Bosnian Muslims) during the war in Bosnia.
U.N. war crimes prosecutors hope to put Karadzic on trial in January, along with Krajisnik and Plavsic, and are pressing authorities to arrest him.
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