IN 2001 CROATIA TRACED 166 PEOPLE GONE MISSING DURING THE WAR

ZAGREB, Jan 24 (Hina) - In 2001 Croatia traced 166 persons who went missing during the Homeland War, while the fate of 1,401 is still unknown, the head of the government's office for detained and missing persons, Lt. Col. Ivan Grujic, told the associations of families of imprisoned and missing soldiers and civilians on Thursday. In previous years, the number of those traced annually was 120, Grujic said, adding that last year all legal, material and technological problems which hampered the identification process were solved. In Zagreb the remains of around 600 exhumed persons who are yet to be identified are buried. Speaking about cooperation in the tracing, Grujic said the Yugoslav side in 2001 for the first time admitted to the existence of graves on its territory containing people from eastern Croatia who were buried in Yugoslavia after the war. Croatia expects Yugoslavia will deliver protocols and the remains of Croats buried in Novi Sad, as well as at other locations in Serbia, he said. In the Bosnian Serb capital of Banja Luka there are also many graves of unknown persons, and we expect they may be those we are looking for, Grujic said, adding around 70 Croatians are listed as missing on the territory of Bosnia-Herzegovina. He said information on the locations of mass and individual graves were a big problem as they proved right in only 40 percent of the cases. The fate of 1,401 missing persons from Croatia is still unknown. So far the remains of 3,298 persons have been exhumed from around 130 mass graves and a large number of individual graves. (hina) np