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Investigation of a war grave in Orahovac. Photo: BIRN.

A total of 456 of the 25,500 people exhumed from war graves in Bosnia and Herzegovina so far were children aged 17 and under, the Institute for Missing Persons told BIRN.

Among them were nine babies who were less than a year old at the time they died.

“Amila Dzaferagic was three months old when she was killed together with her mother Besima. The mortal remains were exhumed from the Laniste mass grave in the Kljuc area. Nurka Carkic and her newborn were exhumed from a joint grave in Drvar,” said Institute for Missing Persons spokesperson Lejla Cengic.

Cengic said the remains of entire families were found in some graves.

She said that an imam called Hasib Ramic and his family, including his wife Sefika and their four children, were exhumed from the Ljubina mass grave in the municipality of Vogosca.

“Muhamed [Ramic] was 13 years old, Meliha was nine, Ahmed four and Amina one month old. Amina is the youngest victim to be found on the territory of Sarajevo. Imam Ramic and his family were killed in the Vogosca area in 1993,” Cengic said.

The youngest victim to be found was a one-day-old newborn member of the Muhic family, who was then buried in the Srebrenica Memorial Centre in Potocari.

Sadik Selimovic, an investigator with the Institute for Missing Persons, said that the Suha mass grave in the Bratunac area, from which 38 victims were exhumed, mostly women and children, was one of the most difficult that the organisation has worked on.

“We found a mother and her two children in a black bag, as well as many little children and Zekira Begic, who was in the ninth month of pregnancy. Working on that grave has upset my health, because all that has affected me deeply,” Selimovic said.

Cengic said that small foetus bones were found inside the expectant mother Zekira Begic.

“This is not the only case of finding a pregnant woman. The remains of expectant mother Zemina Huseinovic and a foetus in her stomach were found in the village of Luka in the Bratunac area,” she said.

Some 7,000 people remain missing from the war that ended in 1995.