Bosnia searches ravine for 200 bodies from 90s war

The Bosnian war crimes court has ordered the start of exhumations at Mount Vlasic, where more than 200 prisoners of war were massacred on Aug. 21, 1992.

Bosnian Serbs told the prisoners from detention camps for non-Serbs in the western Prijedor area they would be released in a prisoner exchange but instead drove them away by bus, lined them up by the edge of a ravine and shot them.

A dozen survived by tumbling or jumping down the cliff.

"The site is inaccessible by foot," said Amor Masovic, a senior official of Bosnia's Institute for Missing People.

"We are preparing ropes and ladders as it is the only way to get down," he said by telephone from the site. He said the abyss was at least 80-metres (260 ft) deep.

Earlier this month, the Bosnian war crimes court arrested and indicted two Bosnian Serb ex-policemen suspected of taking part in the massacre at the Koricanske Stijene site.

"The civilians were ordered to kneel by the edge of a road turned towards the ravine and then were shot with automatic weapons," the indictment said. "After their bodies fell into the abyss, they dropped grenades on them and shot the bodies."

In July, the court sentenced a former Serb policeman to 14 years in jail for crimes against humanity for the massacre at Mount Vlasic. In 2004, the Hague-based war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia jailed another Serb policeman, Darko Mrdja, for 17 years for the same crimes.

More than 3,500 Muslims and Croats were killed in the Bosnian Serb ethnic cleansing campaign in the Prijedor area in 1992. On Monday, relatives buried the remains of 44 victims killed there and found in some of 50 mass graves in the area.