Sarajevo Siege: The Long, Desperate Wait for News of the Missing

"He was a nice and gentle soul. I think he was the best father ever," Djulepa recalled. "He fulfilled all the wishes that he could fulfil for me and my sister."

According to Djulepa, two drunken men came and seized her father on August 2, 1992, saying that they were taking him for questioning.

"He just looked at me with sad eyes and said nothing. I know what he wore. He had jeans on, a yellow Lacoste shirt, a denim jacket and a buttoned grey sweater under the jacket. That's what he was dressed in when he left," she said.

Her mother, who Djulepa described as a woman with reddish-brown hair, went grey overnight.

"She has never been the same again. I think that even now she only lives for us and for the moment when she will perhaps get some information about him," she said.

In the days that followed, her mother tried to find out what happened to him, but without any success. The family has not received any news since then and his remains have never been found.

"For us, he is not dead. He was just taken away from us and he is somewhere… I am sorry that we cannot bury him," Djulepa said with tears in her eyes.

A total of 1,548 people went missing in Sarajevo during the siege that started in April 1992. According to Bosnia and Herzegovina's Missing Persons Institute, 498 of them have still not been found.

In the Novo Sarajevo municipality, where the Grbavica neighbourhood is located, 281 people went missing. The search for 107 of them continues.

Veselin 'Batko' Vlahovic, a Bosnian Serb paramilitary fighter known as the 'Monster of Grbavica' because he waged a campaign of murder, rape and robbery in the neighbourhood in 1992, was jailed for 42 years by the state court for crimes including forcible...