Workers Pull Bodies From Mass Grave in Bosnia

Recovery workers descended into a cave Tuesday to remove bodies from one of the largest mass graves yet discovered in Bosnia or neighboring Croatia.

Up to 300 bodies, mostly Muslim victims of Bosnia’s war, were believed buried in a labyrinthine cave near the northwestern Bosnian village of Hrgar. Bosnian officials began exhuming bodies Monday and by Tuesday had removed 10 corpses. Some remains still had identification cards.

Tens of thousands of people are still listed as missing from the 3 1/2-year war, which ended in December 1995. Many are believed to have been slain and then dumped into pits.

The U.N. war crimes tribunal in The Hague has been using evidence gathered from exhumations to build cases against suspects accused of committing atrocities during the Bosnian war and the 1991 war in Croatia.

The cave near Hrgar is a moss-filled shaft that splits into several tunnels. Excavators enter the shaft in a large metal basket that slides down a wire connected to an aboveground generator.

The exhumation will take at least a month, said Adem Jakupovic, a local judge in Bosnia-Herzegovina’s Muslim-Croat Federation. A U.S. forensic team was expected to help with the exhumation beginning today, he said.

Local officials first learned of the possibility of mass graves in the area two months ago during a meeting of Bosnian Serb and Muslim officials trying to trace the missing.