The International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) has so far carried out 6,838 DNA assisted identifications of Bosnian Muslim victims killed in Srebrenica when the Serb forces under the command of General Ratko Mladic took over that eastern Bosnian area in the summer of 1995.
According to a press release issued on Wednesday by the ICMP , currently headquartered in Sarajevo, an estimated 8,000 to 8,100 victims went missing when Srebrenica fell into the hands of the Serb forces.
To date, this commission has helped in the identification of 6,838 victims.
The establishment and unearthing of mass graves with Srebrenica victims and their identification is viewed by the ICMP as the most complicated forensic challenge, given that in many cases, the bodies of those victims were broken apart when heavy machinery was used by the perpetrators to dig up the mass graves and rebury the bodies in smaller secondary mass graves in an effort to hide the evidence of their crimes. There are examples when parts of a victim's body were found in several mass graves, ICMP said.
Since November 2001, ICMP has led the way in using DNA as a first step in the identification of large numbers of persons missing from the wars in the area of former Yugoslavia. By matching DNA from blood and bone samples, ICMP has been able to help identify 16,722 people who were missing from the conflicts in the region, and of them 13,964 were victims in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the commission reported.
