Muslim Bodies Found, Bosnian Radio Reports

Forensic experts this week exhumed the bodies of 35 Muslims believed to have been killed in eastern Bosnia-Herzegovina during the Balkan country’s 1992-95 war, Bosnian radio reported Friday.

The bodies of the victims were found in three villages in the eastern municipality of Vlasenica, now in the country’s Serbian republic, the radio said.

It added that most of the remains have been well preserved and that their identification should be completed soon.

Twenty-nine of the victims were believed to be from the villages of Sarici and Durici in the Vlasenica area, the radio said.

The remaining six victims, found in the village of Cerska, are presumed to be from the enclave of Srebrenica, the radio quoted exhumation official Murat Huric from the town of Tuzla as saying.

Tuzla is in the Muslim-Croat federation, postwar Bosnia’s other autonomous entity along with the Republika Srpska.

Srebrenica, which had been declared a U.N. “safe area,” was overrun by Serbian forces in July 1995 amid a massive exodus of its Muslim population and a massacre of thousands of men.

According to local and United Nations figures, the remains of about 2,300 Srebrenica victims have been recovered since the end of the war.

Bosnian Serb wartime leader Radovan Karadzic and his military chief, Ratko Mladic, have been indicted twice by the U.N. war crimes tribunal in The Hague for orchestrating the fall of Srebrenica.