TEST EXCAVATION IN SISAK UNCOVERS NO MORTAL REMAINS

SISAK, June 3 (Hina) - Test excavations in Sisak's iodine health spa in Sisak have uncovered no mortal remains or indicators that they might have been there, the president of Sisak-Moslavina County Court, Danko Kovac, told a news conference after the excavation Tuesday. #L# The iodine health spa is one of four locations where excavations have been envisaged in Sisak. Certain non-governmental organisations and some media have claimed for years that at the beginning of the Homeland War, a "co-ordinating camp" was located in the spa, at the time the headquarters of an interior ministry anti-terrorist unit "Vukovi". Government and county officials publicly rebutted the claims several times. At today's conference, County Prosecutor Stipe Vrdoljak said the prosecution had information about 35 ethnic Serbs being killed in the county in 1991 and at the start of the war. Their bodies have been found and identified. Vrdoljak stressed there were pre-investigative processes and added that no investigation into any war crime in the area was currently underway. Today's test excavation was carried out by a team of the government's Office for Missing and Imprisoned Persons, in the presence of representatives of the U.N. war crimes tribunal, Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe and the International Commission on Missing Persons. Another test excavation in Komarevo, near Sisak, is still underway today. Excavations will be carried out at the other two locations within three months. The head of the government's office for missing and imprisoned persons, Ivan Grujic, said 290 people of various ethnic backgrounds were registered missing in Sisak-Moslavina County. Of this number, he said, more than 80 percent were Croats. So far 40 mass graves and a large number of individual graves have been found and dug out in the county. A total of 616 bodies of dead persons have been exhumed and 496 identified. (hina) lml sb