PRIJEDOR (Bosnia and Herzegovina), July 21 (NNN-AGENCIES) — Several thousand people have attended a funeral service in Bosnia for 86 Muslims victims of a massacre committed in Prijedor by Bosnian Serb forces at the beginning of the 1990s Bosnian war.
The remains of the victims, mostly male and many teenagers, were found in 2017 in a mass grave at Koricanske Stijene, a mountain region of central Bosnia.
The remains were found at the bottom of a cliff, in a natural pit, and were covered by an enormous amount of stones.
The victims were part of a group of more than 200 civilians, notably Bosnian Muslims, but also several Catholic Croats, previously held in a detention camp at Trnopolje, in the region of Prijedor.
On Aug 21, 1992, they were loaded onto buses, officially for a prisoner exchange.
But when the convoy arrived at Koricanske Stijene they were offloaded, lined up on the edge of the cliff and executed, according to several verdicts by local courts against members of the Bosnian Serb forces.
It was one of the most horrible episodes of the 1992-1995 inter-ethnic war in Bosnia that claimed some 100,000 lives.
Relatives of the victims, religious leaders and others gathered on Saturday at a soccer stadium near the eastern town of Prijedor, standing solemnly behind lines of coffins draped with green cloths in Muslim tradition.
The victims ranged in age from 19 to 61.
The United Nations war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia has sentenced several ex-Bosnian Serb policemen for the slaughter.
Armin Suljanovic buried some of his brother’s remains on Saturday alongside bone fragments that were previously identified and laid to rest. Suljanovic said his wife’s brothers and father were also being buried after the joint service.
“My relatives and I have been suffering for the past 27 years. It is a painful destiny to have but now, at least we’ll know where they are buried, we’ll have a place to visit to say a prayer for them,” he said.
More than 3,000 Bosnian Muslims and other non-Serbs were killed in Prijedor during the war. Many were taken to prison camps where they were beaten, starved and tortured.
Bosnian Serbs have been accused of carrying out a campaign of ethnic cleansing during the war, expelling non-Serbs from the territories they controlled during the war.
More than 100,000 people died in the war in Bosnia and millions were left homeless. The conflict erupted after the break up of the former Yugoslavia turning Bosnia’s Serbs, Muslim and Croats against each other. — NNN-AGENCIES
