Bosnia mass grave yields 156 Srebrenica victims

SARAJEVO, Nov 25 (Reuters) Forensic experts exhumed the remains of 156 victims of the 1995 Srebrenica massacre in a mass grave found in an eastern Bosnian village, an official of a commission for missing persons said.

Ninety complete and 66 incomplete bodies were found in a secondary mass grave in Snagovo, Murat Hurtic of the Muslim-Croat federation's commission for missing persons said.

Hundreds of bodies had been moved to these secondary graves from the original burial sites to hide the traces of Europe's worst single atrocity since World War Two, Hurtic said. There are seven such graves as well as an original grave in Snagovo.

''We strongly believe that the victims in this grave were also Muslims who were killed in Srebrenica in July 1995,'' he said yesterday.

The original graveyard found in Snagovo contained the bodies of 36 Muslim villagers who were killed by Bosnian Serb paramilitaries early in the 1992-95 war. A suspect in this crime pleaded not guilty yesterday.

About 8,000 Muslims from Srebrenica and surrounding towns who fled to the UN ''safe area'' during the war were killed by Bosnian Serb forces after they captured it on July 11, 1995.

About half of them were found in more than 80 mass graves in the wider area around Srebrenica, but only one third had been identified so far.

First DNA results for the original mass grave in Snagovo found in March showed the victims were villagers who fled to the woods but were later detained, killed and burned, Hurtic said.

Zoran Jankovic, a Bosnian Serb suspected of taking part in this crime, pleaded not guilty yesterday at the Bosnian state war crimes court to the charges of crimes against humanity.

REUTERS BDP PM0842