In Bosnia, a mass grave filled with bodies from the country's civil war in the 1990s was discovered earlier this month, highlighting one of the deadliest periods of the inter-ethnic conflict.
The grave was found in the Koricanske Stijene area in central Bosnia where more than 200 civilians were reportedly executed by Serb forces in August 1992 after they were evicted from a northwestern region, The Sun reported.
"Since the beginning of the exhumation at Koricanske Stijene on Sept. 7, about 40 clusters of human bones have been exhumed, essentially incomplete skeletons," Lejla Cengic, a spokeswoman for the Missing Persons Institute, said, according to The Sun.
The victims are believed to be of Bosniak and Croat ethnicity from Prijedor and its surroundings, the Prosecutor's Office of Bosnia and Herzegovina said, according to CNN.
Boris Grubesic, a spokesman for the prosecutor's office, said the site at Tomasica in Prijedor municipality is believed to be one of the largest mass graves found yet in Bosnia and Herzegovina since the end of the war, CNN reported.
Some 231 complete bodies had been exhumed, along with parts of another 112 people.
Authorities were taking the remains to an identification center in Sanski Most until forensic analysis and an identification process is completed, according to the prosecutor's office, per CNN.
The network reported that International Commission on Missing Persons representatives, along with interior ministry officials for Bosnia and Herzegovina and the prosecutor's office were present for the excavation.
Ethnic tensions between Bosnian Muslins, Serbs, and Croats emerged after the breakup of communist Yugoslavia in 1991, leading to the three-year war, The Sun noted. About 100,000 were killed in the conflict with 2.2 million people being displaced, mainly Bosnian Muslims.
About 9,000 people are still missing from the conflict, some 30 percent reported after the conflict, according to CNN.
In 1995, Bosnian Muslim President Alija Izetbegovic, Croatian President Franjo Tudjman, and Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic agreed to a U.S.-brokered peace deal in Dayton, Ohio, after NATO air strikes against Bosnian Serb troops, Reuters reported.
The Dayton peace accords, signed later in Paris, paved the way for a 66,000-member NATO peacekeeping force in Bosnia to make the agreement stick.
© 2025 Newsmax. All rights reserved.