Croatia Identifies Remains of Serbs Killed in 1990s War

The identification of the remains of the 13 Serbs, which was organised by the Croatian War Veterans Ministry, was completed on Monday at the forensic department of the Zagreb University School of Medicine.

The War Veterans Ministry and the Serbian government's Missing Persons Commission said that the remains were exhumed from grave sites in three different Croatian counties - Karlovac, Sisak-Moslavina and Bjelovar-Bilogora - and were identified using DNA samples.

According to the Croatian ministry, the families of the 13 war victims accepted the identification findings, "thus finally identifying the remains of 13 persons, most of them victims from 1995".

Stjepan Sucic, an assistant to the Croatian War Veterans Minister, expressed condolences to the families and reiterated the commitment of the Croatian authorities to addressing "this priority humanitarian issue".

"Following today's identification, the Republic of Croatia… is still searching for 1,468 missing persons and the remains of 404 dead, which makes 1,872 unresolved cases from the Homeland War," the ministry stated on Monday.

The Serbian Missing Persons Commission said that representatives of the families and members of its monitoring team were present during the process.

"This continues the process of identifying victims of Serbian nationality whose families live in the Republic of Serbia, which is of particular importance to families of missing persons, who have been trying for years to find and in a dignified way bury the remains of their loved ones," the commission said in a press statement on Monday.

It noted that the remains of more than 1,400 Croatian Serbs killed during the war have been identified after exhumation from individual and mass graves between...