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Source: Bosnia Action Coalition

"The buses would go in day and night. They were filled with people.
They always came back from the mine empty. We heard shooting
day and night. At first we heard single shots, then we began to hear
lots of automatic fire. This went on for over two months."
--Ljubija resident telling the NY Times what happened
near a death camp run by Serb militia

January 16, 1996


MASS-EXECUTION SITE REVEALED. Serb forces are destroying evidence of mass
murder by bringing bodies from other mass-grave sites to an abandoned mine in
Ljubija, northwest Bosnia, 12 miles south of Prijedor, several U.S. newspapers
reported this week.
"Everyone seems to be in a hurry to cover their killings," one British
officer told the New York Times. "There are bodies all over this place. We go
in to houses and find floorboards ripped up and holes in the basement. They are
working very hard."
Corpses "are often mangled in old mining equipment, doused with chemicals
and reburied under tons of debris in the open pits," the Times reports. Some
victims are believed to be Muslim men slaughtered in a wave of ethnic cleansing
this fall, after a cease-fire was signed. Others were murdered earlier in the
war.
"There were certainly thousands killed at various camps around the
Prijedor area" Graham Blewitt, a prosecutor with the UN war-crimes tribunal in
the Hague, told the Times. Human-rights workers believe up to 8,000 bodies are
buried at the site.

The site is only a mile from a British military camp, but Serbs have been
destroying evidence unimpeded. "Our job is to separate forces, not look for
mass graves," Lt. Col. Benjamin Barry, commander of British forces, told the
Times.
"Investigating mass graves is not part of my job," NATO commander Admiral
Leighton Smith told Reuters. "Establishing an environment in which others can
do their job is part of my job."
Blewitt hopes investigators can examine the mine in the spring.
NATO spokesman Col. Mark Rayner says that IFOR would be willing to escort
war-crimes investigators to such sites if formally asked, and "other
operational commitments allow."
RETURN TO UNCONQUERED BOSNIA HOMEPAGE