BELGRADE CEMETERY BELGRADE, May 17 (Hina) - An exhumation of the bodies of 61 people killed during wars in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina
BELGRADE, May 17 (Hina) - An exhumation of the bodies of 61 people
killed during wars in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina#L#
in the 1990s began at Belgrade's Lesce Cemetery on Monday following an
agreement between the commissions for missing persons of Croatia and
Serbia-Montenegro.
The exhumation will last ten days and will be followed by another
exhumation of an additional six bodies buried at the town cemetery in
Obrenovac, Serbian commission chairman Gvozden Gagic told reporters.
Colonel Ivan Grujic, assistant to the Croatian minister of family and
war veterans affairs and head of the Department for Detainees and
Missing Persons, who had recently visited Belgrade, said that Croatia
was also interested in exhumations to be carried out at Begejac,
Stajicevo, Sombor and Nis, where detention centres for Croatian
prisoners existed during the war.
The people being exhumed at the Lesce Cemetery went missing during the
war in Croatia. Some of them died at the Army Medical Centre in
Belgrade, some were found in rivers, some were taken from Eastern
Slavonia and put in camps or prisons in Serbia-Montenegro, while some
ended up in Serbian refugee centres as part of transfers of civilian
populations, Grujic said.
"All samples will be made available to Croatian representatives, who
will run DNA tests for unidentified bodies in their laboratory and
match them with blood samples already collected from the families of
missing persons," Gagic said.
Gagic added that all the results would be compared to the findings of
the international commission for missing persons, and that the same
procedure would also be conducted in Croatia because "there is
information that there are similar graves in Zadar, Sibenik and
Slavonski Brod."
(Hina) vm