Doctor ‘using bones of genocide victims for surgeries’ | World News
A doctor hid the skeletons of victims of a genocide in his garden, after using them ‘to plan his orthopedic surgeries’, it was reported.
Footage shows the harrowing moment bones, including skulls, were dug up from under a layer of cement.
Dr Nebojsa Mraovic hid the gruesome secret in his garden in the city of Brčko, in the northwest of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
The remains were excavated in September, but work has been ongoing to identify the victims.
DNA analysis show they are of people killed in the Srebrenica massacre, Europe’s only acknowledged genocide since World War II.
Dr Mraovic buried the bones 11 years ago, building a concrete fountain on top of them.
He told Slobodna Evropa that he ‘does not see anything controversial in the case’, stating that they were used for ‘planning operations’.
‘I used them in the hospital to plan operations, they were useful to hundreds of people,’ the doctor said.
Emza Fazlic, a spokesperson for the Missing Persons Institute, saidDNA analysis determined that the remains belonged to two people killed during the genocide.
‘DNA analysis showed that the bone remains found belonged to two people who disappeared in Srebrenica in 1995,’ she said.
What happened in Srebrenica
The Bosnian War resulted in the death of around 100,000 people, and the displacement of over two million men, women and children.
It erupted in 1992 after the former Yugoslavia broke up and Bosnian Serbs launched a rebellion and a land grab to form their own state and join Serbia.
In July 1995, Bosnian Serbs overran a U.N.-protected safe haven in Srebrenica.
They separated at least 8,000 Muslim Bosnian men and boys from their wives, mothers and sisters, and slaughtered them.
The perpetrators then plowed their victims’ bodies into mass graves, which they later dug up with bulldozers, scattering the remains among other burial sites to hide the evidence of their war crimes.
The massacre has been declared a genocide by international and national courts.
Still, Serb leaders in Bosnia and neighboring Serbia continue to downplay or even deny it, despite the evidence of what happened.
‘Other bone remains belonging to the skeletons of these people were also found in different places.’
She added that the people were buried in a collective funeral in 2021 and 2022 with missing parts of the skeletons.
‘We have previously found bone remains buried in the gardens of houses,’ she added.
‘The homeowners were not aware of it. This is the first time we encountered someone who consciously took the bone remains they found, buried them in the garden of their house, and then had a pool built on top of them.’
The city is located 80 miles from the town of Srebrenica, the site of the genocide, but the bodies of victims have been found in 570 areas across the country.
So far, the remains of more than 6,600 people have been discovered – mostly into hastily made mass graves – and then reburied.
Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@metro.co.uk.
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