More Than 160 Victims Identified from Lake Perucac

Lejla Cengic, the spokesperson of the Institute for Missing persons of Bosnia and Herzegovina, said that DNA profiles taken from the remains suggest that the total number of victims will be more than 200.

Of the 162 victims identified so far, 160 were Bosnian Muslims, and two were Serbs.

“Among the victims who were found, 40 were women, including three underage girls. The total number of children is 10, amongst whom is the youngest victim, three-and-a-half year old Haris Podzic," said Cengic.

She added that the identification process revealed that 36 victims were older than 60 at the time of their death.

According to information from the Bosnian Institute for Missing persons, 24 of the victims were men and women who disappeared in the Srebrenica region in July 1995 after Bosnian Serb forces took control of the city and killed around seven thousand Bosnian Muslims.

The rest of the victims were reported as missing in the Bosnian municipalities of Visegrad, Foca and Gorazde, as well as the Serbian cities of Priboj and Prijepolje, and Kosovo.

Hundreds of people are believed to have been killed in a May 1992 action by Serb police and military forces during the Bosnian war.

Judges at the Hague tribunal have described the Visegrad atrocities as one of the “most notorious campaigns for the deportation of Bosniaks”.

They said hundreds of men, women and children were killed on various bridges and dumped into the Drina river over a period of one month.

The tribunal sentenced Mitar Vasiljevic, a former member of the “White Eagles” paramilitary group, to 15 years in prison for crimes committed in the area.

It also sentenced Milan Lukic, a former leader of the group, to life imprisonment and Sredoje Lukic to 30 years in prison.

The Bosnian Institute for Missing persons began searching the Lake Perucac region in July 2010 with counterparts from Serbia and Kosovo joining the team the following month.

Since that operation, experts have been analysing more than 1,000 bone samples and trying to match their DNA profiles with missing people.

Kosovo officials have focused on the site because the bodies of Kosovo Albanians are believed to have been dumped there during the Kosovo war.