New War Crimes Indictments Likely, U.N. Says

War crimes investigators have completed exhumations of mass graves in northwestern Bosnia and expect to issue new indictments this year in connection with a 1995 massacre in the Muslim enclave of Srebrenica, prosecutors said Wednesday.

But delays in the forensic investigations in Bosnia-Herzegovina have pushed back the expansion of an indictment against Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic and the filing of new charges against other key individuals for war crimes in Kosovo (a province of Serbia, the main Yugoslav republic), U.N. Deputy Prosecutor Graham Blewitt said.

He said the bottleneck was due to limited resources at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia.

Prosecutors have said that Milosevic, accused of being responsible for massacres in Kosovo Albanian villages last year, may also be charged with genocide, the most serious crime under international law. He was indicted for war crimes along with four key aides during the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s bombing campaign in the spring of 1999, which drove Yugoslav forces out of Kosovo.

Blewitt said investigators in the Prijedor region of northwestern Bosnia have recovered 116 bodies from two mass grave sites since May. He said new indictments are expected later this year against additional suspects in the Srebrenica case as a result of the new investigations.