GRABOVAC: BiH PROSECUTOR'S OFFICE SILENT ON CRIMES IN SIJEKOVAC

BROD, MARCH 10 /SRNA/ - The Prosecutor's Office of BiH has not yet launched an investigation into the fate of the people from three buses carrying Roma who were killed by members of the Croatian Army in 1992 in Brod, Marko Grabovac, president of the Organization for the Search for Fallen Soldiers and Missing Civilians from Brod, told SRNA.

"We suspect that at the location below the Catholic cemetery in Dubočac, next to the Sava River, there are the mortal remains of 160 people who disappeared in 1992 from three buses in which Roma were travelling," Grabovac said. He stated that members of the Croatian Army killed 220 Roma in Brod during 1992, including 115 children between the ages of seven and fourteen, and that women and elderly people were also among those killed. Grabovac recalled that the families of those killed from Brod learned, based on the testimony of a member of the Croatian Army, that the Roma from the first bus, 59 of them, including 18 children, were killed in Brod near an abandoned Muslim cemetery. He stated that on August 10, 2004, the mortal remains of 59 victims, including 18 children, were exhumed from a mass grave in Sijekovac near Brod. The remains were later taken by representatives of the Federation branch of the BiH Missing Persons Institute and buried in a cemetery in Visoko. "It is unacceptable that judicial institutions at the level of BiH remain silent about war crimes," Grabovac emphasized. Grabovac concluded that the process of searching for missing Serbs is at a complete standstill and that the families are dissatisfied with the work of the BiH Missing Persons Institute, which, he said, is doing nothing to speed up the process of searching for, exhuming, and identifying missing Serbs.