Forensic experts piece together the remains of unknown victims of war

When two shots were fired at forensic investigators disembarking from a small boat on a lake in eastern Bosnia last month, it underlined how sensitive and politically charged is the issue of missing persons, not just in Bosnia but in other parts of the world touched by wars, ethnic violence and large-scale human rights abuses.

• A Bosnian forensic scientist attempts to identify the remains of a victim of the Srebrenica massacre Picture: AFP

The incident took place on Lake Perucac, where a month ago forensic staff began looking for the remains of bodies after the water level was lowered for dam work, exposing a large number of human skulls and body parts - the remains of people killed at the start of the 1992-95 war and thrown into the Drina river, which divides Serbia and Bosnia.

Forensic experts from the International Commission on Missing Persons, or ICMP, and Bosnia's Missing Persons Institute, or MPI, have pieced together more than 70 full skeletons recovered from the lake.

Amor Masovic, the head of the MPI, said that in the nearby town of Visegrad 824 Bosnian Muslims were killed by Serbs at the start of the war. Most were then thrown from a bridge and their bodies got lodged in the banks of the artificial lake, a dammed section of the Drina.

Mr Masovic said the killings were so frequent that the management of the hydroelectric plant across the border in Serbia appealed in 1992 over the radio that whoever in Bosnia was responsible should "stop throwing bodies into the lake because they were clogging up the culverts in the dam".

The 50 public service employees helping forensic experts in the search were joined by 46 who had answered an appeal notice nailed on the gates of mosques in Sarajevo.

The volunteers and the forensic staff are part of the ongoing operation, led by the ICMP and MPI, to find, identify and return to the respective families the remains of the estimated 30,000 people who went missing during the war in Bosnia.

The International Day of the Disappeared, on 30 August each year, is an initiative that sprang out of the issue of the thousands of enforced disappearances in Central America in the 1980s.

But it is DNA that has really comes to the rescue of the world's missing.

Honed to an operational sharpness by ICMP in its Sarajevo-based laboratory system, DNA-assisted identification techniques have to date identified more than 6,400 of the estimated 8,100 victims of the 1995 Srebrenica massacre in Bosnia.

"Using DNA-assisted identification and other techniques, more than two-thirds of the estimated 30,000 persons missing from the conflicts in Bosnia have been identified, an achievement unprecedented anywhere in the world," says ICMP spokesperson Jasmina Mameledzija.