234 bodies exhumed from Bosnian mass grave

Forensic experts completed the excavation of a mass grave in eastern Bosnia today and said they had found 234 bodies of people…

Forensic experts completed the excavation of a mass grave in eastern Bosnia today and said they had found 234 bodies of people killed in the 1992-95 Bosnian war.

Excavation of the site near the town of Bratunac, about 55 miles northeast of the capital Sarajevo, took three weeks.

Most of the dead appeared to be Bosnian Muslims who had lived in Bratunac and were killed by Bosnian Serb forces in 1992.

A smaller number of the victims were believed to have been killed in the 1995 massacre in nearby Srebrenica, the largest massacre in post-World War II Europe.

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The Bratunac site is a secondary grave, where bodies initially buried elsewhere were dumped. The remains will undergo DNA analysis to try to identify the dead.

Over the years, UN and local forensics experts in Bosnia have exhumed 16,500 bodies from more than 300 mass graves, though thousands still remain missing.

About 250,000 people were killed and 1.8 million driven from their homes during the conflict.