Fate Unknown: The Long Search for Sarajevo’s Missing Serbs

"I'm still looking for my father's remains, 27 years after he was killed. The last time I talked to him was over the phone on June 24, 1992. Two days later I called again. No one answered the phone," Milan Mandic, a pre-war resident of Sarajevo, told BIRN.

The war came to Sarajevo in early April 1992, after Bosnian Serb troops, helped by the former Yugoslav People's Army, started surrounding the city, following a referendum on February 29, 1992 to declare the country's independence from the Yugoslav Federation.

Nearly 100,000 people were killed in the war - more than 11,000 of them in besieged Sarajevo.

Before the war broke out in 1992, Sarajevo-born Mandic, a Serb, worked as a communications technician at the main post office in the city. The beginning of war did not scare him out of the city, so he continued working until he was injured in late April 1992. He was transported by helicopter to a hospital in Pale, a wartime Bosnian Serb stronghold.

"I was alone there. My wife and two children, as well as my parents, were still in Sarajevo. I thought the shooting would stop soon, but very soon I realised it would not, so I decided to get my wife and children out of the city," he said.

But his parents were convinced that no one would take action against them because they were elderly.

"They were wrong. My mother was detained and taken to the nearby Dobrinja neighbourhood, controlled by Bosnian Muslim troops. For some two weeks, she was kept in a basement of what used to be a bank," he said.

The basement's floor, as his mother later told him, was covered with wooden palettes, under which water was poured so that none of the inmates, around 35 of them, could sit or lie on the ground.

His mother was then transferred to the...