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Suva Reka mass grave exists, Committee for Kosovo confirms
July 21, 2001



Belgrade, July 21 - The Federal Committee for Kosovo-Metohija Subcommittee for missing persons Vladimir Bozovic confirmed on Friday that he had received from the UNMIK data on the existence of a mass grave in Suva Reka, containing 850-900 bodies.

At the meeting of the joint commission of the UNMIK and the Federal Committee in Pristina, the representatives of the Interim Administration Mission in Kazoo showed us an official document containing information on the mass grave in Suva Reka, Bozovic told the Radio B92.

He announced that, with the permission of the UNMIK, the Federal Committee delegation accompanied by Serbian pathologists and reporters is to visit next week the site to which they had been referred by the UNMIK.

Some UNMIK officials       denied on Friday the report on the mass grave in Suva Reka, claming there was no mass grave and that the statement of the head of the Missing and Detained Persons , Monique Feinberg, had been misinterpreted.

The Radio B92, repeats, however, Feinberg's statement that there was "a much larger and enclosed mass grave in Suva Reka."

"Some 850-900 bodies have been buried there. The corpses are unidentified, which means that we have no way of knowing the identities of the buried. They could belong to any ethnicity; however, we suspect those are the bodies of the Serbs and members of minority communities," Feinberg said.

Bozovic said that he wanted the exhumation works to start as soon as possible, as "there have been too long delays, only prolonging the agony in expectation of the truth; while we are interested in determining the identity of the bodies and returning them to the families."

The statement of the Federal Committee for Kosovo-Metohija Subcommittee for Human Rights described as unacceptable further delaying of the exhumation and identification of the bodies found in the Suva Reka mass grave.

Reacting to Thursday's statement of the UNMIK Bureau for the Missing Persons announcing for next year the beginning of exhumation and identification of the approximately 900 unidentified Serb bodies buried in the Suva Reka gravesite, the Subcommittee for Human rights points out that the work must not be further delayed.

"It is high time some concrete action were taken in this question, considering the fact that it has been more than two years since the arrival of the international peacekeeping force in Kosovo-Metohija, the destiny of the missing and detained persons remaining unknown all the while," it is stressed in the statement.


 


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