WAR CRIMES investigators unearthed around a dozen bodies yesterday from a mass grave of Bosnian Muslims. They are believed to have been massacred by Serb forces after the fall of the UN-mandated safe haven of Srebrenica a year ago this week.
The bodies, some of them layered one of top of the other, were found in a 15-metre long strip of earth dug out by the 20-strong team of investigators, anthropologists and forensic experts.
They lay where they had fallen, down an embankment leading off a rough dirt track just above a stream, on a remote wooded hillside outside Cerska in eastern Bosnia.
Three days into the excavation, organised by the International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia (ICT), the team used a mechanical digger, picks, shovels, spades, trowels, brushes and their hands to gingerly break up and lift away the top soil from the bodies.
Red flags in the ground picked out the extent of the grisly tomb where clothing, skeletal remains and other evidence was marked out, each by its own marker.
A full year on from the fall of Srebrenica, the bodies have fragmented. Two detached skulls lay exposed to the air. At another area of the site, a boot could be seen with leg bones protruding from it.
"The bodies that are close to the surface are well on the way to skeletalisation. We are finding bones, clothes, bits of flesh and bits of things like that," said Dr William Haglund of the Physicians for Human Rights.
The site at Cerska is one of several connected with the massacres of Muslims that occurred in the aftermath of Srebrenica's fall to Bosnian Serb forces on July 11th.
The investigators came to Cerska after hearing eyewitness accounts of the killings there.
Cerska is one of the smaller mass graves, Mr Cees Hindriks, chief of investigations for the ICT, said.
Survivors of the Bosnian Serb attack on Srebrenica have testified that thousands of disarmed men were taken off in buses from the Muslim majority town after it fell and shot by Serb execution squads.
At least 3,000 but possibly as many as 8,000 people were murdered in what is described as the worst atrocity in Europe since the second World War.
Evidence unearthed at these locations will be used to corroborate witness statements on the events following the fall of the former UN safe area.
The ICT has already indicted the Bosnian Serb President, Dr Radovan Karadzic, and his military commander, Gen Ratko Mladic, for genocide in relation to the alleged slaughter.
In the next couple of days, the exposed bodies will be removed and stored in a refridgerated container before being taken off to an examination centre.
"We are looking for whether they [the bodies] are male or female, the pattern of injuries and how did they die," Dr Haglund said.