Close to 20 bodies have been unearthed from a mass grave in a village near Sarajevo, Bosnian officials said Wednesday.
The grave was discovered at the Sarajevo city cemetery in Vlakovo village, 10 miles west of the city, after the village reverted to Muslim-Croat control in March 1996 under the terms of a peace accord."Over the past three days we have found close to 20 bodies and we are sure the site contains some more bodies," Amor Masovic, an official from Bosnia's Muslim-Croat federation, told Reuters.
While a bulldozer carefully removed earth from a grassy hillside and uncovered decomposed bodies, a nauseating stench spread over the area.
Masovic said all bodies uncovered so far were men wearing civilian clothing who were most probably killed at the onset of the country's bloody 3 1/2-year war in 1992.
"Judging by the way the bodies were twisted and intertwined in the ground, we think they were dumped from a truck in a group," he said. He gave no details of the identities of the men or their religion.
Like many other villages surrounding Sarajevo, Vlakovo was conquered by Bosnian Serb forces and fitted into a wider ring around the city that Serb forces held throughout the war.
But under the terms of a Bosnian peace accord signed in November 1995 Sarajevo became a unified city again and Serbs withdrew from the suburbs, unwilling to live under Muslim-Croat rule.
When the Muslim and Croat cemetery employees returned to their jobs, they noticed the landscape of the cemetery had changed and alerted the authorities, Masovic said.
Since the reunification of the city Sarajevo, officials and forensic experts have found about 300 bodies on various sites around the city, he said.
The International Committee of the Red Cross estimated about 11,000 people were missing in Bosnia, while the country's Muslim-Croat federation officials put the toll at more than 25,000.