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Exhumations of mass graves from Post-war Period become topical in Slovenia

LJUBLJANA, Sept 29 (Hina) - The topic of discovering mass graves containing bodies of victims killed in the wake of the Second World War has grabbed the attention of the Slovene public and media with a recent exhumation of corpses of 60 Slovenes, 26 Croats and two Serbs from a 40-metre deep Konfin pit on Mount Kocevski Rog, 60 kilometres southeast of the Slovene capital of Ljubljana,
LJUBLJANA, Sept 29 (Hina) - The topic of discovering mass graves containing bodies of victims killed in the wake of the Second World War has grabbed the attention of the Slovene public and media with a recent exhumation of corpses of 60 Slovenes, 26 Croats and two Serbs from a 40-metre deep Konfin pit on Mount Kocevski Rog, 60 kilometres southeast of the Slovene capital of Ljubljana,

Local historian Joze Dezman was quoted by the commercial POP TV network as saying last Tuesday the massacre of these victims was one of the gravest crimes because sick and wounded people were taken from the Ljubljana hospital on 24 June 1945 by partisans and thrown into the pit.

Anthropologists and other experts who were engaged in the exhumation said the pit contained the bodies of 88 men aged between 16 and 25 at the time of death. They were probably soldiers, and bullet holes were found in the sculls of about a half of the victims.

Dezman said that the identity of the victims had been established with the help of hospital records and records kept by the Ljubljana branch of OZNA, the Partisan-led People's Protection Organ, i.e. the intelligence agency led by the Communist Party.

The victims' identity will be additionally confirmed with DNA methods.

According to moderate estimates, in the first two months after the end of the Second World War, about 80,000 people were killed on the territory of Slovenia, and it is likely that there are more than 500 mass graves from that time, Dezman said.

The case of the Konfin Pit bears evidence to the attempt of the former communist authorities to conceal the crimes because the execution sites were often camouflaged or surrounded by booby traps, he added.

According to the Slovene media, out of 500 identified mass graves, only about ten have been investigated.

Crime investigation expert Pavel Jamnik has said there are still people in Slovenia who can testify about the execution of tens of thousands people by the (Tito-led) partisans in the two months following the end of the Second World War.

However, there is a conspiracy of silence, Jamnik was quoted by the Ljubljana-based Dnevnik daily on Friday.

Jamnik, who heads a team of investigators that has been probing these crimes since 2001, said their task was to establish who was responsible for the post-war crimes, including killings without trial of members of "collaborationist" armies, civilians and political opponents to the communist authorities captured in Slovenia at the time.

A former long-standing senior communist official, Mitja Ribicic, who was OZNA chief in Slovenia in 1945, is widely believed to be among those responsible for the crimes, however, the Office of the Slovene Chief Prosecutor recently failed to instigate proceedings against him.

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