Thousands still missing from Bosnia war

Bosnia-Herzegovina is still dealing with the dilemma of thousands of people filed as missing from the Bosnian war in the 1990s, Press TV reports.

According to officials, there are still more than 8,000 missing people from the war that ended 20 years ago, while 22,000 bodies have been exhumed and identified until now.

“After the war in our country, more than 30,000 people were missing due to the numerous crimes committed here and so far we have exhumed and identified around 22,000 people,” Lejla Cengic of the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) told the Press TV correspondent in Sarajevo.

According to the ICMP, information at hand regarding the mass graves usually proves to be incorrect, and only about 15 percent of it is reliable.

“A large number of missing people, around 3,000 of them, still have not been identified. Their remains are at 11 different morgues in Bosnia and Herzegovina. We are currently in search of 8,000 missing people and at the moment we do not have the information of where the remains are hidden,” Cengic added.

Their identities have not been determined by DNA analysis due to reasons such as lack of blood samples to compare bone samples with, or the fact that the remains are so damaged that the isolation of DNA is impossible.

At the start of the Bosnian war in 1992, Srebrenica was a mainly Muslim town in a Serb-held part of Bosnia. On July 11, 1995, Bosnian Serb forces overran Srebrenica, separated women and children from men, and then systematically murdered the men in mass executions. Mass graves were later found in the area.

More than 8,000 Muslim men and boys were massacred in Srebrenica at the hands of Bosnian Serb forces.

Saturday 20 September 2014

http://www.presstv.ir/detail/2014/09/20/379314/thousands-still-missing-from-bosnia-war/