Bosnia tracing over 7,500 missing persons 25 years after the war

NEWS 29.08.202011:10
FENA/Općina Hadžići

Twenty-five years after the war Bosnia and Herzegovina is tracing over 7,500 missing persons, the national authorities and international officials have warned, calling on everyone with information to reveal locations of mass graves.

“At the moment we have 7,547 active cases, which is the number of persons who are still being traced in BiH and the neighbouring states and who are BiH citizens,” Amor Masovic of the BiH Missing Persons Institute has said.

The disappearance of 28,320 persons was officially registered in the 1992-95 war. To date, thanks to DNA analysis, the remains of 14,749 have been identified. Shortly after the war, 6,024 missing persons were identified before the existence of DNA labs.

The head of the International Commission of Missing Persons (ICMP) programme for the Western Balkans, Matthew Holliday, has called for disclosure of information in a speech ahead of August 30, which the UN declared International Day of the Disappeared.

He has called on everyone with information on hidden mass graves to contact the authorities so that light can be shed on the fate of those still missing,

Holliday has also called on missing persons’ families who have not provided blood samples yet to contact the ICMP so that the identification of the missing by DNA analysis can continue.