Grujic and Bomberger told a news conference that on the basis of an agreement which the Croatian Ministry of the War Veterans' Affairs and the international commission signed in November 2004, in 85 cases DNA samples of the victims found in mass or individual graves and their relatives matched.
The comparison of DNA samples from living relatives and their missing loved ones has been proved to be the most reliable method of identification of victims.
Ivan Grujic said that Croatia had decided to cooperate with the ICMP as it was well-known that some of Croatian citizens had been killed outside the country.
We know that at least 65 Croatian citizens were killed in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Grujic said explaining that those were mainly people from western Slavonia and Banovina, who were forcibly taken to Bosnia in the early 1990s.
The authorities of Serbia-Montenegro are also involved in this project, given that the exchange of all the available data will help efforts aimed at finding missing persons as soon as possible, Grujic and Bomberger added.
Currently, the Croatian department for detained and missing persons is searching for 1,139 persons who disappeared at the start of the war in 1991 and 1992. Most of them are Croats. In addition, the Croatian authorities are also searching for 917 persons, mainly Croatian Serbs, who disappeared in 1995.
The Croatian authorities have so far unearthed 142 mass and more than 1,800 individual graves in which 4,070 bodies have been found.
To date, 3,314 persons have been identified, or 81.4 percent of the entire number of the bodies exhumed.