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Separated Families Finally Reunite at Visoko Morgue By Samir Koric
"I recognised my brother Izet by his thick sweater and I'm now waiting to identify my other brother, Nezad," said 31-year-old Rizvanovic.
He was one of 60 people who came to the Visoko morgue to try to identify the exhumed remains of 47 Muslim men. Bosnian government sources say Serb forces slaughtered them in a bus on June 14, 1992. "I survived and I remember every thing that happened that day. But reliving this misery makes me wonder how it ever could have happened," he told Reuterss.
The sources said that Bosnian Serbs herded 55 Muslim men from the village of Ahatovici, west of Sarajevo, on to a bus and told them they would be handed over to the government side in a prisoner exchange. The prisoners were forced to lie on the bus floor which later stopped in a remote area north of Sarajevo.
Serb soldiers got off the bus, then fired into it with rocket-propelled grenades and small arms, killing 47 of the prisoners, the sources said. The other eight pretended to be dead until they could make their escape.
"During the attack I was lying down while the hands, legs, brains and kidneys of my comrades were falling on me," Rizvanovic said. He was badly wounded but managed to crawl from the bus to nearby forest where he hid when Serb soldiers returned and fired into the bus again. Villagers later rescued him and buried the dead in a common grave.
On Monday government workers and a forensic specialist from the U.N. war crimes tribunal exhumed the grave.
Friends and relatives of the dead were summoned on Wednesday for the grim task of identifying the decomposed bodies of their loved ones before a proper burial. The remains were laid out in simple wooden coffins in a morgue heavy with the stench of death. Weeping men and women gagged and occasionally fainted.
Rings, documents and remnants of clothing were the keys to most identifications. "This is so difficult for all of us. It could not be worse," choked Atija Mujkic, 41, who came to Visoko, north of Sarajevo, to identify her husband and son who were among 12 members of the Mujkic family killed in the massacre.
"Most of these dead were young and innocent," she said. "The Serb killers murdered all the men in our village and I hope they all burn in hell."
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VISOKO, Bosnia, June 26 (Reuters) - Zaim Rizvanovic relived a nightmare on Wednesday when he was called to identify the bodies of two brothers and three cousins killed in Bosnia four years ago in a massacre from which he escaped only by feigning death.
AHATOVICI
Fourth Report on War Crimes in Former Yugoslavia June-July 1992
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