Bodies found in lake on Bosnia-Serbia border

Ksenija Prodanovic

Sarajevo/Belgrade (dpa) – Bosnian officials said Wednesday that the remains of 20 bodies had been found in the manmade lake of Perucac, located between Bosnia and Serbia.

The head of the Bosnian Institute for Missing Persons, Amor Masovic told local media that the remains would be sent to the town of Visoko, 30 kilometres west of Sarajevo, for further analysis.

Masovic said that the remains most likely belonged to Bosnian Muslims killed in Visegrad city at the beginning of the 1992-95 Bosnian war.

Another possibility, Masovic said, was that the remains belonged to German officers killed during and immediately after World War Two and buried on the banks of the Drina river, where Perucac was dug out in the 1960s.

On the other side of the lake, Serbian officials are conducting their own search. The head of the Serbian Missing Persons Commission, Veljko Odalovic, told the media that bones had been found but it was not yet known whether they were human or animal.

In 2001, a truck containing the bodies of 50 Kosovo Albanians killed during the 1998-99 conflict was found in the lake. The families of the victims believe that there are more bodies in the lake as the doors of the truck were open.

Odalovic said that so far there were no indications of a mass grave in the lake.