Investigators have dug up at least 48 bodies, presumably of murdered Kosovo Albanians, from a mass grave in western Serbia, a local district court said Saturday.
"Based on preliminary results of autopsy of bodies dug up from a mass grave near [the town of] Bajina Basta, it has been established that there were at least 48 human skeletons" in the grave, it said in a statement carried by Beta news agency.
Thirty eight victims were males, one female, while court experts were not able to establish sex of nine bodies, the statement said.
"The victims, all in civilian clothes and older than 17, had fatal injuries caused by firearms and had been buried for about two years," it added.
The investigators collected parts of victims' clothes and took DNA samples for identification, the court said.
The excavation was monitored by UN war crimes tribunal experts, representatives of OSCE, the international commission for missing persons and the local non-governmental Humanitarian Law Center.
The grave is situated near the Perucac hydroelectric plant in southwest Serbia where in July bodies were found floating in the reservoir. They were thought to be from a group of 60 Kosovo Albanians killed by Serbian forces and put in a truck and dumped in the reservoir in 1999.
Serbian investigators have previously dug up more than 340 bodies from four other mass graves, two in a Belgrade suburb and two in eastern Serbia, that are thought to contain a large number of murdered Kosovo Albanians.
The victims were among an estimated 800 Kosovo Albanians killed by the former regime of Slobodan Milosevic during its bloody two-year campaign in Kosovo, which were then shipped to Serbia proper.
Belgrade's new authorities believe the bodies, which constituted key evidence against the regime, were removed in secret and hidden in a number of mass graves as the international community rallied against Milosevic and NATO troops readied to move into Kosovo itself in 1999.
No charges have been brought yet as police said they are continuing the investigation.
Thousands of ethnic Albanians went missing during the 1998-99 Kosovo conflict, and the West accused Milosevic's forces of committing widespread atrocities.
Milosevic is now awaiting trial before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague for his alleged role in war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in the province.
Some 2,500 ethnic Albanians and 1,300 Serbs are still listed as missing, two years after the end of the conflict -- BELGRADE (AFP)
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