prijava
MOSTAR, October 20 (FENA) - According to the BiH Missing Persons Institute (INO) 7,206 are still being searched out of 34,964 missing persons reported since the 1990s war in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Certain number of the missing will probably never be found because the bodies of many victims have ended up in rivers and lakes, but the BiH Institute for Missing Persons is working intensively and exploring all the possibilities and sites on a daily basis and checking all available information to find the final locations of the victims' graves, Spokesperson of the BiH Missing Persons Institute Emza Fazlić told FENA.
"Time is a big problem in the search for locations of graves, as fewer and fewer people know where the mass graves are, and those who do, unfortunately, do not want to talk about it," said Fazlić.
Time also affects the configuration of the terrain, making it difficult to locate mass graves.
Concerning the specific figures, Spokesperson of the BiH Missing Persons Institute said that more than 800 mass graves and thousands of individual graves have been found in Bosnia and Herzegovina so far. The largest number of mass graves was found in Prijedor and Srebrenica.
Even though 24 years have passed since the war ended, the Institute has been receiving information on potential burial sites on a daily basis.
Fazlić points out that information about potential graves is mostly obtained by word of mouth, therefore there is no other way of verifying the accuracy of this information other than the exhumation itself.
"Although witnesses who tell us about these sites claim that mass graves are located in these locations, it often turns out that this information is incorrect," she added.
Regarding the possibility that some of the persons reported missing were actually alive, Spokesperson of the BiH Missing Persons Institute noted that such cases were also recorded.
"Given the information we currently have, 911 people were reported to be alive. These cases are thoroughly checked and so far, 664 persons have been definitely confirmed to be alive and have been deleted from our registry," stated Fazlić.
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