FORENSIC EXPERTS COMPLETE INVESTIGATION INTO OVCARA MASS GRAVE

ZAGREB, Jan 9 (Hina) - Experts of the Hague-based international war crimes tribunal have confirmed that 200 bodies of mainly lightly wounded patients from Vukovar hospital were buried in the Ovcara mass grave outside the eastern town of Vukovar, Croatian Deputy Prime Minister Ivica Kostovic said on Thursday. They have completed the forensic part of the investigation, substantiating all counts of the Hague tribunal's indictment, Kostovic told a press conference in Zagreb. Tribunal investigators examined all 200 bodies and made preliminary identification of 60 victims. Documentation was currently being handed over to Croatian experts who would carry on the identification. The head of the Croatian forensic team, Davor Strinovic, said that international investigators had handed over to Croatian experts files, protocols of autopsy findings and part of photographic documentation for the 60 identified bodies. When Croatian experts had taken over all the photographs and confirmed the identifications, they would notify the families of the victims and in cooperation with them make the final identification of each person, he explained. Strinovic said that international experts had handed over a large amount of personal items of the remaining 140 victims and were yet to deliver complete documentation so that the identification process could continue. Kostovic said that 52 psychologists and psychiatrists, together with nurses, would help the families of the victims as part of an aid programme and, if necessary, gather additional data from them. Kostovic said that the families' wishes regarding the burial of their loved ones would be respected and that any unidentified bodies would be buried in joint graves in Zagreb and Vukovar. The joint graves would be constructed in such a way as to facilitate future identification. The Croatian government would receive the footage of the exhumation, made by a British ITN camera crew under an agreement with the Hague tribunal and the UN Transitional Administration in Eastern Slavonia, in mid-February, he said. Kostovic emphasized that the Ovcara mass grave site was being guarded. The head of the government Commission for Detained and Missing Persons, Col. Ivan Grujic, reported on last year's work of the commission. Grujic said that 350 cases had been solved so that now Croatia was looking for 2,497 missing persons. 830 victims of Serbian aggression had been exhumed in the liberated areas, of whom 706 had been identified, which meant that more than 85 percent of identifications had been successful, he added. (hina) vm mm 091654 MET jan 97