Official: Serb Report Shows Massacre Plan

[Guest Banders Kennany]

By SAMIR KRILIC, Associated Press Writer

 

SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina - A Serb commission's final report on the 1995 Srebrenica massacre acknowledges that the mass murder of 7,800 Muslim men and boys by Bosnian Serb forces was planned, an international official said Monday.

 

AP Photo

 

The report on the worst massacre of civilians in Europe since World War II was presented to the Bosnian Serb government last month but has not yet been made public.

 

"The report itself admits and provides details of the plan and deliberate liquidation of thousands of Bosniaks (Muslims) by the Bosnian Serb forces," Bernard Fassier, the deputy to Bosnia's top international administrator, Paddy Ashdown, told reporters.

 

Although Bosnian Serbs have long been blamed for the massacre, it was not until this past June — following the Srebrenica commission's preliminary report — that Serb officials acknowledged that their security forces carried out the slaughter.

 

The number of victims has long been disputed, with Bosnian Muslim officials claiming 8,000 men and boys were killed in Srebrenica. But Fassier said the commission found that 7,800 were killed after it compiled 34 lists of victims.

 

Nearly 1,200 Srebrenica victims have been identified through DNA analysis.

 

Fassier said the report also gives names of people who "could be perpetrators" of the massacre, but declined to give any details.

 

Several Bosnian Serb troops and commanders have been convicted by the U.N. war crimes tribunal in The Hague (news - web sites), Netherlands, for their roles in the Srebrenica killings.

 

Bosnian Serb wartime leader Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, his top general, are wanted for genocide and crimes against humanity in Srebrenica and elsewhere during the 1992-1995 war.

 

The peace agreement that ended the war left the country divided into a Bosnian Serb mini-state and a Muslim-Croat federation. Both have separate governments, police and army and are linked only by joint state institutions.

 

The Bosnian war — which pitted Serbs opposed to Bosnia's independence from the former Yugoslavia against Muslims and Croats backing it — claimed about 260,000 lives and left around 20,000 missing and presumed dead.