Bosnian, Serbian experts say skeletal remains of 97 war victims recovered from lake

Sarajevo: Authorities in Bosnia and Serbia said yesterday they had recovered the skeletal remains of at least 97 people from the banks of a border lake that was partially drained this summer for maintenance.

Officials from the Bosnian and Serbian Commissions for Missing Persons said 372 bone fragments were found on the Bosnian bank of Perucac lake and 79 on the Serbian side.

By counting the right femurs recovered, experts determined the bones belonged to at least 97 people — victims primarily of the wars that accompanied the break-up of Yugoslavia. But authorities said only DNA analysis will reveal the total number and identities of the dead.

Most were killed by Serbs in the nearby town of Visegrad at the start of the 1992-1995 Bosnian War. But on the Serbian side experts found the remains of what they presume to be 11 Albanians killed during the Kosovo war in 1998-1999.

Some 1,000 people went missing in and around Visegrad — almost all of them Bosnian Muslims who were killed and thrown from a bridge over the Drina river. Their bodies lodged in the banks of the artificial lake, a dammed section of the Drina, a few kilometres downstream.

"We presume that at least one-third of the missing will be found this way but the chances are minimal that the others who ended up in the Drina river will ever be recovered," said the head of the Bosnian Commission for Missing Persons, Amor Masovic. The lake's water level is lowered for maintenance every 30 years.

Frequent killings

The killings in Visegrad were so frequent and so numerous that the management of the hydroelectric plant across the border in Serbia appealed in 1992 over the radio for whoever in Bosnia was responsible to stop throwing bodies into the lake because they were clogging up the dam's culverts.

Now, 18 years later, experts from the two countries are looking for the remains together. Authorities in Serbia postponed refilling the lake long after maintenance was done to allow more bodies to be recovered.