86 Muslims Victims Cried At Funeral As Massacres Body Of Bosnian War' Remaining Found In Massive Burial

86 Muslims Victims Cried At Funeral As Massacres Body Of Bosnian War' Remaining Found In Massive Burial

Hundreds gathered yesterday to mourn 86 Muslim victims of one of the worst massacres of the Bosnian war in the 1990s.    

They had been part of a group of more than 200 civilians, notably Bosnian Muslims, but also several Catholic Croats, previously held in a detention camp at Trnopolje, in the region of Prijedor.

The remains of the victims, mostly male and many teenagers, were discovered in 2017 in a mass grave at Koricanske Stijene, a mountain region in central Bosnia. 

On August 21, 1992, they were loaded onto buses, officially for a prisoner exchange, but when the convoy arrived at Koricanske Stijene they were offloaded, lined up on the edge of the cliff and executed, according to several verdicts by local courts against members of the Bosnian Serb forces.

Their remains were found at the bottom of a cliff in a natural pit, covered by an enormous amount of stones.

It was one of the most horrific episodes of the 1992-1995 inter-ethnic war in Bosnia that claimed some 100,000 lives.

Mourners yesterday gathered in Prijedor at a funeral service for the victims.

Medina Garibovic, 29, who lives in Switzerland, came to bury her father Sefik, who was 35 when he died.

'We separated from each other in May 1992 at the train station in Trnopolje (a village near Prijedor),' she said

My mother, my sister and I first left to Slovenia. He was supposed to join us a week later. But he was taken to the camp in Trnopolje and we never saw each other again,' she said.