AN RTE television documentary which revealed the existence of a mass grave in Bosnia three years ago has been passed to the UN War Crimes Tribunal on the former Yugoslavia.
RTE's current affairs reporter Cathy Moore, and a producer, Michael Heney, travelled to Brcko in north eastern Bosnia in January 1993.
A month later their findings were shown on RTE's Tuesday File, which identified the location of a mass grave at Brcko.
Pictures, taken by a Serb photographer now in hiding and shown in that programme, were used in a Daily Telegraph report yesterday. The Telegraph report, claimed that as many as 3,000 Muslim and Croat victims of Serb "ethnic cleansing" were buried at Brcko.
Mr Heney said last night that though the RTE programme was entered in a prestigious Monte Carlo television festival and was seen by top news executives from a range of television networks in Europe, the report did not win, international acclaim until it appeared in yesterday's Daily Telegraph.
Ms Moore said she and an RTE film crew had gone with Mr Heney to the former Yugoslavia toe focus on a town that had been "ethnically cleansed" and "to show how a family whose lives were lived in normality had now, edge into a nightmare".
She traced a male photographer, a Serb, who had taken dramatic pictures of a killing of a Muslin in Brcko and who had also photographic evidence of people being buried in a mass grave.
"This photographer was passing through the town at the time. He had seen the burials happening. Those carrying out the burials' were quite nonchalant about what was going on," she said.
The photographer could point out a sign in one photograph which lead to a meat factory located in the area.
The RTE crew showed film they had taken themselves to eyewitnesses who were able to point out precise places where they had seen people murdered. Mr Heney said they had walked down the very road leading to the site of the mass grave which was described in the Telegraph story.
The Telegraph report said that though the grave was situated in territory patrolled by US soldiers of the Nato peace force, commanders said they would not provide troops to prevent Serbs from interfering with known burial sites.
A tape of the programme, which was broadcast in February 1993, was handed over to the tribunal as part of the growing mass of evidence confirming the huge scale of Serb "ethnic cleansing" that now believed to have taken place in the strategically important Brcko region.
Ms Moore said chat she and her colleagues in RTE had drawn up, maps of the area and eyewitnesses were able to locate where they had seen graves. She also spoke to many other people who gave horrific accounts of atrocities.