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UN Uses Radar to Seek War Graves in Kosovo, Serbia

September 17, 201806:35
A team of UN experts recorded data using ground-penetrating radar in an attempt to detect the presence of human bones in potential wartime mass graves at five locations in Kosovo and Serbia.

This post is also available in this language: Shqip Macedonian Bos/Hrv/Srp

Ground-penetrating radar unit. Photo: Kosovo Institute of Forensics.

The UN expert team used ground-penetrating radar last month in a five-day search for potential wartime mass graves at three locations in Kosovo – in the village of Bukosh in the Suhareka municipality, the village of Uglar in the Gjilan municipality and in the Gracanica municipality.

In southern Serbia, two further searches were carried out in Kisevak and Jaloviste near Rudnica.

The data recordings were sent to an expert in Argentina for further analysis before a decision is made about whether to proceed with further searches.

The conclusions will be provided to Kosovo and Serbia in the coming months through an International Committee of Red Cross, ICRC-chaired mechanism of the Working Group on Missing Persons.

Fabien Bourdier, chairperson of the ICRC’s Working Group on Missing Persons, which facilitates communication between Serbia and Kosovo, explained that ground-penetrating radar can detect buried bodies.

“This device is usually used to see the inside of different materials and structures in numerous applications, including soil sub-surface features, which may assist in locating grave sites,” Bourdier told BIRN.

Arsim Gerxhaliu, head of Kosovo’s Institute of Forensics, which is part of Kosovo’s missing persons working group, said that the data recordings were made in hard terrain.

“This GPR can detect the presence of bones at a depth of up to 12 metres,” Gerxhaliu told BIRN.

Gerxhaliu explained that thousands of metres of ground were covered at the five locations.

“If the results tell us that there is the presence of human bones or mass graves, this will help us so much to search faster and identify missing people,” he said.

A total of 1,648 people are still listed as missing from the war in Kosovo, 561 of whom are non-Albanians.

Some of the locations where the UN team used the ground-penetrating radar equipment, like Kisevak, have been excavated several times and the remains of several people found.

Prenke Gjetaj, chairperson of the Kosovo government’s Missing Persons Commission, said that if this method proves effective, it can be used again in other searches for missing persons.

“These records will serve as a first test to see if this method is helpful. We are waiting for results, believing that this will help us at least to verify if information we received about mass graves are accurate,” Gjetaj told BIRN.

He said that in recent years the level of information received about mass or individual graves from the war has decreased significantly.

This year in Kosovo, only one location has been excavated, in the Kosovo western town of Gjakova/Djakovica, where the remains of four people were found.

By the end of the war in Kosovo in 1999, the ICRC registered more than 6,000 people from all ethnic communities as missing. More than 4,400 mortal remains have since been found.

At the end of its mandate, the EU’s rule-of-law mission in Kosovo, EULEX, said it was handing over to the Kosovo authorities around 2,000 files of missing persons classified as war crimes.

Read more:

Missing Persons: Balkan Families Suffer as Search Goes On

Hundreds Join Missing Persons March in Kosovo

Kosovo Mother’s Lonely Vigil by Son’s Empty Grave

This post is also available in this language: Shqip Macedonian Bos/Hrv/Srp


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