SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina
This year’s 20th anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre will be marked by the burial of 136 victims identified over the past year, an official said on Friday.
The Institute for Missing Persons said 160 corpses from the 1995 massacre of 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys by Bosnian Serb paramilitaries had been identified since last year’s July 11 anniversary.
The youngest is a 16-year-old boy of mixed Muslim-Serb parentage whose body was recovered from a secondary mass grave. The remains of 17 other under-18s have been identified.
“We have formally identified 136 victims, whose families have declared that they want the remains to be buried on July 11 this year... the identified persons are ready for the collective funeral on July 11," institute spokeswoman Lejla Cengic told Anadolu Agency.
They will be interred at Potocari memorial center.
The families of 24 victims are waiting to bury their loved ones as not all their remains have been found.
In the summer of 1995 Srebrenica was overrun by troops led by Ratko Mladic, currently on trial at The Hague for ordering the killings. Dutch UN peacekeepers watched on as Serb troops herded men and boys from the town to be murdered.
Since the end of the war, hundreds of Bosniak families have searched for missing relatives, most of who were buried in mass graves around the country.
A total of 6,166 Srebrenica victims have been buried at Potocari and a further 230 are buried outside the town.
