Jakarina Kosa is a secondary mass grave, located in the Ljubija iron ore mining complex, 18 kilometres from the city of Prijedor. Also located within the Ljubija complex are the Tomasica mine, where one of the largest primary mass graves in the country was discovered, and the Omarska mine, where a detention camp was set up by Bosnian Serb authorities at the beginning of the war.

Exhumations at the Jakarina Kosa site were first carried out in 2001, when more than 300 body parts were exhumed. In July 2015, there was a second exhumation, and more than 600 body parts were discovered. In total, remains belonging to 311 individuals have been identified at the Jakarina Kosa gravesite.

Expert reports by the International Committee on Missing Persons based on DNA analysis showed that remains from the same individuals were found at both Tomasica and Jakarina Kosa. 

The remains from Tomasica and Jakarina Kosa were identified as those of Bosniaks and Croats from the town of Kozarac, the city of Prijedor and the villages of Biscani, Hambarine, Rizvanovici, Rakovcani, Carakovo and Zecovi, as well as those of detainees held at the Omarska and Keraterm detention camps in the Prijedor area. The bodies found at Jakarina Kosa were wearing civilian clothing.

The gravesite at Jakarina Kosa is located around five kilometres down a road from the main building at the former Ljubija mine. It is not easily reachable, as the road is unpaved and full of potholes and the gravesite is located deep inside a pit. It remains unmarked.

The primary mass grave at Tomasica was partly dug up by the Bosnian Serb Army and the local police in 1993 and a large number of bodies were taken away and reburied  at Jakarina Kosa, 37 kilometres away, as part of an attempted cover-up of the killings. 

According to the Missing Persons Institute, the process of transportation of the bodies lasted for two weeks at last. Locals around the Jakarina Kosa site were ordered to evacuate during this period so that they could not be witnesses to what was happening. 

The transportation of the bodies from Tomasica to Jakarina Kosa was well-organised and was carried out at night. The incompletely decomposed body parts that were loaded onto trucks left traces of bodily fluids on the streets, and water tanks were provided to clean up the streets and the trucks after the loads were transported. The remains were unloaded from the trucks into the pit at Jakarina Kosa and then mined in order to close up the pit and prevent further access to the site. 

Prijedor is the area with the largest number of convicted war criminals in Bosnia and Herzegovina. A total of 37 Bosnian Serbs have been found guilty of committing crimes in the area and have been sentenced to a total of 617 years in prison. The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia gave Milomir Stakic, wartime president of the Serb-controlled Prijedor municipality Crisis Staff, the highest sentence for crimes in Prijedor – 40 years in prison.

Stari Kevljani is a secondary mass grave located in the village of Kevljani, 20 kilometres from the city of Prijedor. The grave was exhumed in August 2004 by the Bosnian Missing Persons Institute and the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, ICTY. DNA analysis showed that the remains of 456 individuals were buried at the site.

Stari Kevljani is one of the largest mass graves to have been discovered in the Prijedor area. The grave was 20 metres long and five metres wide and deep. Of 456 remains found there, 354 were identified.

The village of Kevljani is around four kilometres from the Omarska mine complex, where the Bosnian Serb Army had a wartime detention camp in 1992. Several other mass graves have been discovered in the same village, one of them not far from the Stari Kevljani site. 

Many of those identified from the Stari Kevljani gravesite were Bosniaks and Croats men who were detained and last seen in the Omarska camp, or in two other camps in the Prijedor municipality, Keraterm and Trnopolje. Forensic evidence showed that the cause of death in the majority of cases was gunshots, and that a number of the victims had bone fractures. A significant number of the individuals who were identified were political, administrative and religious leaders, academics and well-known public figures from the Prijedor municipality. 

Locals in Kevljani marked the gravesite with a memorial plaque engraved with the words: “At this site in 2004, the largest mass grave in Bosanska Krajina, Stari Kevljani, was found with a total of 456 innocent victims from the Prijedor municipality.” The gravesite is located in a meadow in the village, next to a house.

A witness at the trial of Bosnian Serb military leader Ratko Mladic trial testified that torture and killings happened daily in the Omarska camp. Up to 6,000 people were held at Omarska camp while it was open in 1992, over a period of three months. Mass executions also started at the end of July 1992. Detainees were forced to clean the areas where people were killed and load their bodies onto trucks to be taken away. 

The camp was closed on August 21, 1992 after visiting British journalists who exposed the inhumane conditions and war crimes in the camp. The detainees were then transferred to other camps in the area. According to the Regional Union of Associations of Detainees from the Banja Luka Region, around 700 people held at the Omarska camp died, although not all of them were killed inside the camp itself. 

The Hague Tribunal has convicted 11 people of committing crimes at detention camps in the Prijedor area, and the Bosnian state court has convicted four more. Zeljko Mejakic, the highest-ranking official at the Omarska detention camp, was sentenced to 21 years in prison for crimes against humanity.

Prijedor is the area with the largest number of convicted war criminals in Bosnia and Herzegovina. A total of 37 Bosnian Serbs have been found guilty of committing crimes in the area and have been sentenced to a total of 617 years in prison. The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia gave Milomir Stakic, wartime president of the Serb-controlled Prijedor municipality Crisis Staff, the highest sentence for crimes in Prijedor – 40 years in prison.

The Tomasica mass grave was discovered by the Bosnian authorities in September 2013, close to a large mining complex, approximately 15 to 20 kilometres south-east of the city of Prijedor.  An area of 70 metres by 120 metres was excavated over 79 days. The remains of 435 people were found; 274 were identified. It was one of the single largest mass graves to be found in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The remains were mostly those of war victims who were killed in various places around Prijedor from 1992 to 1995. 

The location of the mass grave remains unmarked, even though it lies in a populated area, some 15 minutes’ drive from Prijedor. Close to the gravesite are a number of houses and a football pitch. Before the war, the area was owned by the state and used by the Ljubija mining company. 

The exact location of the mass grave was revealed to the Bosnian Missing Persons Institute by a former Bosnian Serb soldier who took part in the cover-up of the killings, but wanted to stay anonymous. The bodies were mostly those of Bosniaks, most of whom were killed in the city of Prijedor, the village of Biscani or nearby Keraterm and Omarska prison camps, then loaded onto trucks and dumped in pits at the Tomasica site, some of which were as deep as nine metres. Twenty-nine of the bodies found at Tomasica were those people killed in the infamous ‘Room 3’ at the Keraterm camp in 1992.

The Tomasica mass grave is mostly a primary mass grave which initially contained many more than 435 bodies. During the 1990s, more than 350 of the bodies were dug up and buried again in other locations, including a pit in Jakarina Kosa, 40 kilometres from Tomasica, in the second attempt at a cover-up. 

Before the main discovery in 2013, there were several other attempts to find bodies of war victims around the Tomasica mine. In 2004, the remains of 24 people were found, while two years later, ten bodies were discovered. 

A further attempt was made in July 2020 when the authorities launched an exhumation acting on information from a local Serb, but no new discoveries were made. 

Prijedor is the area with the largest number of convicted war criminals in Bosnia and Herzegovina. A total of 37 Bosnian Serbs have been found guilty of committing crimes in the area and have been sentenced to a total of 617 years in prison. The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia gave Milomir Stakic, wartime president of the Serb-controlled Prijedor municipality Crisis Staff, the highest sentence for crimes in Prijedor – 40 years in prison.

Hodzici Road 2 (also known as Snagovo 3) is a secondary mass grave, located near the village of Snagovo, some 17 kilometres north-west of the city of Zvornik. The grave was originally found by troops from NATO’s Stabilisation Force in Bosnia and Herzegovina, SFOR, in 1998, while diverting a road around a landslide. There are seven known mass graves in the area, all secondary sites. It was named Hodzici Road because the village of Hodzici is nearby. A total of 160 human remains have been exhumed.

This secondary mass grave, which was called Snagovo 3 by the Bosnian Federal Commission on Missing Persons, was investigated by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, ICTY in 1998 and responsibility for exhuming it was handed over to the Bosnian government in 2001. 

DNA analysis carried out by the International Commission on Missing Persons showed connections between this secondary gravesite and the disturbed primary gravesite Lazete 2 (also known as Orahovac 2). According to the ICTY’s forensic report on Srebrenica exhumations, this means that the remains of one individual were found in at least two different graves. The investigation also showed DNA connections between this site and Hodzici Road 1 (also known as Snagovo 4) and Hodzici Road 3. This indicates that human remains were dug up at the Lazete 2 primary mass grave and transferred to Hodzici Road, some 10 kilometres away. 

Forensic analysis of soil/pollen samples, evidence and aerial images of creation/disturbance dates, further revealed that bodies from the primary mass graves Lazete 1 and Lazete 2 were dug up and reburied at secondary graves in Snagovo.  

The Hodzici Road gravesite remains unmarked, on a meadow next to a rural mountain road, surrounded by woods.

ICTY verdicts found that captured Bosniak men from Srebrenica were transported on July 14, 1995 to a school in the village of Orahovac. In the early afternoon, Bosnian Serb Army Zvornik Brigade personnel under the supervision of Drago Nikolic,a security officer with the Bosnian Serb Army’s Zvornik Brigade, and Milorad Trbic, Assistant Commander for Security with the Zvornik Brigade, then transported the captives to a nearby field, where personnel, including members of the 4th Battalion of the Zvornik Brigade, executed them with automatic weapons.

In related verdicts, the ICTY’s trial chamber found Radislav Krstic, the Deputy Commander and Chief of Staff of the Bosnian Serb Army’s Drina Corps, guilty of genocide against Bosniaks from Srebrenica – its first verdict establishing that the Srebrenica masacres constituted genocide. Krstic was sentenced to 46 years in prison, although the sentence was subsequently shortened to 35 years.

The ICTY also found that Ljubisa Beara, the chief of security of the Bosnian Serb Army’s Main Staff, was told to organise, coordinate and facilitate the detention, transportation, summary execution and burial of the Bosniak victims murdered at Orahovac. Beara was assisted by, among others, commander Vujadin Popovic, Chief of Security of the Bosnian Serb Army’s Drina Corps, as well as Nikolic and Trbic. 

Beara, Popovic, Nikolic and Trbic were found to have supervised, facilitated and overseen the Orahovac executions, and the ICTY convicted them of genocide. Vidoje Blagojevic, commander of the Bratunac Brigade of the Bosnian Serb Army, was sentenced to 15 years in prison for aiding and abetting the murder and persecution of Bosniaks in the Srebrenica area, as well as aiding and abetting the murder of Bosniaks in Bratunac. Dragan Jokic, chief of engineering of the Zvornik Brigade of the Bosnian Serb Army, was sentenced to nine years in prison for the murders of Bosniaks in Orahovac, at the Branjevo Military Farm in Pilica and in Kozluk, and for providing engineering resources and personnel to dig mass graves for the executed victims.

According to the Federal Institute for Missing Persons in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the remains of 818 Bosniaks from Srebrenica were discovered at seven secondary gravesites in the Snagovo area.

Ravnice is a primary mass grave, located 20 kilometres north-west of the town of Srebrenica. It is six kilometres from an agricultural warehouse in Kravica where more than 1,300 Bosniaks from Srebrenica were executed by Bosnian Serb forces in July 1995. According to the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, there were no signs that the gravesite was disturbed or that bodies were moved on purpose.

In August 2000, the ICTY exhumation team initially discovered 34 bodies at the site called Ravnice 1. The rest of the exhumation process continued from July and August 2001, where 172 more bodies were exhumed. This part of the exhumation was done by the Bosnian Missing Persons Commission while the ICTY monitored the process. The second exhumation at the same location was named Ravnice 2. However, Ravnice 1 and 2 are considered to be one mass grave, from which a total of 258 human remains were exhumed.

Most of the remains were discovered on the surface of the steep sloping ground at the site and the bodies were reduced to skeletons as they had been exposed for more than five years to the atmosphere and to the attention of animals. Some bodies were covered with earth, while others were not and had rolled down the slope until they were stopped by trees and fences.

During the exhumation of Ravnice 1 and 2, materials such as concrete, plaster and other building material were found within the grave. These were considered to bе indistinguishable from materials found at the Kravica warehouse execution site and the Glogova 1 and Glogova 2 mass graves, as well as the secondary mass graves at Zeleni Jadar 5 and 6. Of particular interest was а dual-coloured piece of painted polystyrene foam found at Ravnice 2. This piece of foam was identical to foam lettering on the northern face of the Кravica warehouse above an entrance doorway.

The ages of the victims at Ravnice potentially ranged from eight to 90 years old at the time of their deaths. All of them had been shot, often multiple times. There was evidence of at least 700 shots having been fired.
All of the bodies were male and wore civilian clothing. Fourteen of them were 17 years of age or younger.
The Ravnice site remains unmarked on a steep slope next to the road in the woods. Since then, the warehouse at Kravica has changed little, although access to it is not allowed as it is now privately owned.

From July 12 to 13, 1995 around 5,000 Bosniak men from Srebrenica were captured by the Bosnian Serb Army. On July 13, more than 1,300 Bosniaks were transported to the Kravica warehouse, where they were executed with automatic rifles and hand grenades. Between July 14 and 16, heavy equipment arrived and removed the victims’ bodies to two large mass graves in the nearby villages of Glogova and Ravnice.

Nedeljko Milidragovic, Aleksa Golijanin, Milivoje Batinica, Aleksandar Dacevic, Bora Miletic, Jovan Petrovic, Dragomir Parovic and Vidosav Vasic are accused of organising and participating in the shooting of more than 1,300 civilians in the warehouse. The Serbian prosecution charged them in 2015 and the trial opened in February 2017, but proceedings have been plagued by delays.

So far, the ICTY and domestic courts in the Balkans have sentenced a total of 47 people to more than 700 years in prison, plus five life sentences, for Srebrenica crimes.

Lake Perucac is an artificial lake on the Drina River, bordering both Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia, and lying between the city of Visegrad on the Bosnian side and the town of Bajina Basta on the Serbian side. The location was used for the disposal of corpses during both world wars, as well as during the 1990s conflicts. 

So far, the remains of 238 people who died in the 1990s wars have been identified in Lake Perucac, after being killed either by the Bosnian Serb Army or the Yugoslav Army and police. Some of the victims whose bodies have been found in the lake were killed in Srebrenica, Zvornik and Visegrad during the 1992-95 war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, while 84 of the bodies were those of victims of the 1998-99 war in Kosovo.

The location of the mass grave is unmarked, and Lake Perucac is a popular tourist destination with summer houses, restaurants, cafes and water sports facilities. The artificial lake was created in 1966 to serve the needs of the hydroelectric power plant in Bajina Basta, a town some 13 kilometers away.

The first exhumations of bodies at the lake were carried out by the International Commission on Missing Persons in September 2001, when the remains of ethnic Albanian victims from Kosovo were found. 

A decade later, after the site was re-examined after a request from the Institute for Missing Persons of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Working Group for Missing Persons in Pristina, there were more excavations, during which the remains of mostly Bosniak victims killed during the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina were found.

In 2013, even more human remains were found after the authorities lowered the level of the lake. 

The remains of 10 children have been found at this lake, of whom the youngest, a boy named Haris Podzic, was three-and-a-half years old. The remains of 40 women have also been found, most of them from the city of Visegrad. 

Judges at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, ICTY described the atrocities committed in Visegrad during the Bosnian war as one of the “most notorious campaigns for the deportation of Bosniaks”. Most of the bodies were thrown into the River Drina, but the current washed them into the lake. 

The bodies of people killed in the Kosovo war were dumped directly into the lake. After some of the corpses started floating near the dam of the hydroelectric power plant in Lake Perucac, Vlastimir Djordjevic, a high-ranking Serbian Interior Ministry official, said that “measures should be taken to clear up the terrain”. This was followed by a secret state operation to move the corpses from the water to a mass grave on the shore. 

The operation was carried out by Interior Ministry operatives including Djordjevic who was later sentenced to 18 years in prison by the ICTY.

Several other people have been prosecuted by the ICTY for crimes related to the mass grave at the lake. The tribunal sentenced Mitar Vasiljevic, a former member of the White Eagles paramilitary group, to 15 years in prison for crimes committed in the area. It also sentenced Milan and Sredoje Lukic, both former leaders of the same paramilitary group, to life imprisonment and 30 years in prison respectively.

Zeleni Jadar is an area some 20 kilometres south of Srebrenica in eastern Bosnia where at least seven clandestine gravesites were found, all of them secondary mass graves connected with the attempted cover-up of the July 1995 Srebrenica massacres. 

The Zeleni Jadar 6 mass grave was discovered in 2001 and the remains of 135 people were exhumed. 

From Srebrenica, it is a half-hour drive to the hills of Zeleni Jadar, where unmarked gravesites lie on both the left and right sides of the road, in forests and fields. 

According to the report compiled by investigators from the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, most of the victims buried at the site were male, aged from eight to 65 years old. Six of them were 17 or under. Clothing was still present on most of the bodies, while some had signs of burning. The vast majority were found to have died from gunshot injuries. Only a few personal belongings were found – watches and smoking-related items. The primary mass grave from which human remains were moved to Zeleni Jadar 6 was the one at Glogova, located close to the town of Bratunac.

As at the Zeleni Jadar 5 mass grave, concrete, plaster and other building materials detected in the grave matched those from a warehouse at a farm in Kravica, close to the town of Bratunac. On July 13 and 14, 1995, Bosnian Serb forces killed 1,313 Bosniaks from Srebrenica in Kravica. 

After the fall of Srebrenica in July 1995, more than 7,000 Bosniak men were killed and most of them buried in July in six primary mass graves: Branjevo, Kozluk, the Petkovci Dam, Cerska, Orahovac and Glogova. During September and October 1995, the primary graves at these locations were dug up by Bosnian Serb forces and the bodies were reburied in secondary graves in an attempt to cover up the crimes. 

The exhumation and transfer of corpses from Glogova to Zeleni Jadar took place at night over a period of time between August 24 and October 23, 1995. Following instructions from Bosnian Serb Army commanders Vujadin Popovic and Vidoje Blagojevic, another high-ranking officer with the Bosnian Serb Army, Momir Nikolic, assisted in the exhumation and reburial operation. 

The reburial operation was dubbed ‘asanacija’ in Serbian, meaning hygiene and sanitation measures. According to Nikolic, ‘asanacija’  normally involved the removal and burial of dead bodies from a battlefield, but in this case, the term referred to the relocation of the bodies buried in Glogova to smaller secondary graves in the area surrounding Srebrenica, Zeleni Jadar in particular. The operation was supposed to be a covert one but was carried out openly and required the involvement of a lot of manpower, resources, assets and vehicles.

The Bratunac Brigade Military Police secured the road from Bratunac to Srebrenica in order to facilitate the movement of the vehicles through inhabited areas. They also secured the grave sites as workers from the Municipal Staff for Civilian Protection of Bratunac did the digging work. Civilian police officers were involved as well. An excavator loader and a backhoe excavator were used for the digging and four to five trucks were used to transport the bodies from Glogova to Zeleni Jadar.

For these and other crimes related to the killings in Srebrenica, the ICTY and domestic courts in the Balkans have sentenced a total of 47 people to more than 700 years in prison, plus five life sentences.

Zeleni Jadar is an area some 20 kilometres south of Srebrenica in eastern Bosnia where at least seven clandestine gravesites were found, all of them secondary mass graves. The first one discovered, known as Zeleni Jadar 5, was found in 1998, yielded the remains of people killed during the Srebrenica genocide in July 1995. 

The area remains unmarked – clandestine grave sites were scattered along both sides of the road, some of them deeper into a forest, some in fields, some close to the river that bears the same name as the area, Jadar. 

Many of the body parts found in the graves in Zeleni Jadar matched remains found at the Glogova 1 and 2 gravesites. At all of the Zeleni Jadar graves – Zeleni Jadar 1A, 1B, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 – links with the Glogova 1 primary grave were established through the identification of body parts belonging to the same individuals found in both the Glogova 1 grave and one of the secondary graves.

At the beginning of the excavation, forensic teams from the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, ICTY noted that most of the bodies found were incomplete, while clothing was present on most of the bodies and relatively few had personal possessions like watches, jewellery, smoking-related items and papers. 

The age of the victims found ranged from eight to 65. One of the youngest victims found was a 14-year-old, Senad Beganovic, whose body parts were found in four mass graves including the Zeleni Jadar 5 site. 

According to the ICTY forensic report, most of the victims had gunshot wounds, while a few had injuries from explosions and explosive devices. 

At Zeleni Jadar, seven gravesites can be linked to executions at a warehouse at a farm in Kravica, close to the town of Bratunac. On July 13 and 14, 1995, Bosnian Serb forces killed 1,313 Bosniaks in Kravica. 

Remains of the victims of a separate mass shooting in a hangar behind the Vuk Karadzic school in Bratunac, where 400 Bosniaks were detained on July 13, 1995, were also found at Zeleni Jadar.

So far, the ICTY and domestic courts in the Balkans have sentenced a total of 47 people to more than 700 years in prison, plus five life sentences, for Srebrenica crimes.

The mass grave in Branjevo in north-eastern Bosnia and Herzegovina was one of the first five mass graves to be discovered almost a year after the war ended. It was found by the investigators from the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia about 130 metres from the Branjevo Military Farm, where more than 1,000 Bosniaks from Srebrenica were executed in July 1995. 

It is а deep, primary grave on the edge of a large, cultivated field near the village of Pilica on the western side of the River Drina, across a bridge from neighbouring Serbia. 

The area where the grave was found is now almost unrecognisable and difficult to find as it lies in the middle of a recently-built village, spread among private houses, agricultural fields and a small forest. 

The Branjevo Military Farm building was also torn down after the war and the Bosnian Serb authorities built a new neighbourhood at the site with a church, private homes, shops and other buildings. The land originally belonged to the Agroprom company, but in 1994 it was requisitioned by the Bosnian Serb Army’s Zvornik Brigade to produce food for soldiers.  

А preliminary reconnaissance of the area was conducted in April 1996, while autopsy examinations of victims were carried out in October that year.

It was found that the victims were killed away from the grave and subsequently placed in it. The wrists of 77 of them were bound. According to a forensic report compiled by Physicians for Human Rights, all the individuals found in the mass grave were dressed in civilian clothing with the exception of one person who was wearing military trousers. 

Forensic reports and witness testimonies at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, ICTY, including testimony from people who were part of the killing squads, confirmed that most of the victims found in Branjevo grave were killed at the Pilica Cultural Centre by Bosnian Serb forces in mid-July 1995. 

After the fall of Srebrenica to Bosnian Serb forces, captured Bosniaks were brought by buses to Branjevo Military Farm for execution. Survivors described being led in groups to a meadow littered with corpses and told to turn their backs. On July 16, 1995, soldiers at Branjevo Military Farm were ordered to go some five kilometres east to the Pilica Cultural Centre to kill around 500 Bosniaks who were being detained there. Firing and explosions could also be heard that afternoon in Pilica itself, coming from the direction of the Cultural Centre. No one survived the execution. The inside of the Pilica Cultural Centre was described as having corpses “piled up on each other, just lying there scattered all over the place” and the bodies – two of which were female – were all wearing civilian clothes. The bodies were then buried at Branjevo Military Farm. 

So far, the ICTY and domestic courts in the Balkans have sentenced a total of 47 people to more than 700 years in prison, plus five life sentences, for Srebrenica crimes.

Kozluk is a primary mass grave of Bosniaks from Srebrenica, near the village of Kozluk, 15 kilometers north-east of the city of Zvornik. The site is approached by а road that passes the Vitinka soft-drink bottling factory in Kozluk. The road degenerates into а track as it reaches an area used for rubbish dumps and gravel extraction by the River Drina. The gravesite remains unmarked. 

In 1998, investigators from the International Criminal Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia visited the site and discovered disturbed soil. They returned in June 1999 and began the process of exhumation. DNA examinations bу the International Committee on Missing Persons indicated that there were 341 victims in the Kozluk grave. However, investigations concluded that before the exhumation started, some bodies had been removed from the grave as part of attempts by the Bosnian Serb Army to cover up the killings. 

After execution, the victims killed at the Kozluk site were covered with soil rather than being buried in pits. They were found wearing civilian clothes. Thousands of broken green glass bottles had been dumped before the execution happened, as well as labels from the nearby Vitinka water and soft drinks bottling factory, and this was one of the factors that helped to link the primary mass grave at Kozluk to secondary mass graves at Cancari Road 1 (Kamenica 14), Cancari Road 2, Cancari Road 3,  Cancari Road 7 and Cancari Road 13, as well as DNA analysis, soil analysis and the large number of bodies that had ligatures and blindfolds. 

The ICTY judgment in the trial of  Dragan Jokic, Chief of Engineering for the Zvornik Brigade, and Vidoje Blagojevic, commander of the Bratunac Brigade of the Bosnian Serb Army, said that on or about July 15 or 16, 1995, Bosnian Serb Army military personnel, under the command and control of commanders Ratko Mladic, Radislav Krstic and others, transported approximately 500 Bosniak males to an isolated place near Kozluk, which was inside the Zvornik Brigade’s zone of responsibility. They were then summarily executed by Bosnian Serb military personnel with automatic weapons. On or about July 16, 1995, military personnel from the Zvornik Brigade’s Engineering Company, again controlled by Mladic, Krstic and others, buried the victims in a mass grave at the site. Jokic assisted in the planning, monitoring, organising and carrying out of the burials.

Blagojevic was sentenced to 15 years in prison for aiding and abetting the murder and persecution of Bosniaks, including those executed at Kozluk. Jokic was sentenced to nine years in prison for the murders of Bosniaks at locations including Kozluk, and for providing engineering resources and personnel to dig graves for the victims.

The ICTY’s trial chamber also found that Vujadin Popovic, chief of security with the Bosnian Serb Army’s Drina Corps, knew about the operation to kill the Bosniaks, and organised it with Ljubisa Beara, chief of security with the Bosnian Serb Army’s main headquarters, and Drago Nikolic, a security officer with the Bosnian Serb Army’s Zvornik Brigade. Popovic was present when the executions were carried out at Kozluk, as well as at another killing site in Orahovac. Popovic, Beara and Nikolic were all convicted by the ICTY of involvement in the genocide of Bosniaks from Srebrenica.

Srecko Acimovic, commander of the Bosnian Serb Army Zvornik Brigade’s Second Battalion, acting on orders received from the Zvornik Brigade’s command, provided ammunition and issued an order to transport the prisoners to the banks of the Drina River in Kozluk, where they were killed and buried. Acimovic was sentenced by the Bosnian state court to nine years in prison for assisting the genocide.

In 2015, in the fourth exhumation at Kozluk, a new gravesite was found and the remains of a further 55 people discovered – 15 complete and 40 incomplete bodies. As some remains were transferred from the Kozluk site to other locations, the search for at least 200 more bodies continues.