Authorities will visit seven towns hit by decades of fighting and take testimony and blood samples from local residents to help forensic teams identify bodies

This article is more than 4 years old

This article is more than 4 years old

Colombia is intensifying efforts to identify about 28,000 victims of the country’s long-running civil war whose bodies were dumped in unmarked graves.

In the coming weeks, judicial authorities will visit seven towns hit by decades of fighting and take testimony and blood samples from local residents to help forensic teams identify bodies.

Colombia's government and Farc rebels reach agreement in step to end civil war Read more

The chief prosecutor’s office said on Monday that over five years they have identified 897 of 1,017 bodies exhumed from unmarked graves in public cemeteries.

But that’s a small fraction of the more than 28,000 bodies that the interior ministry has located in potters’ fields and unmarked graves at 297 cemeteries nationwide.

“This hasn’t been easy work,” Digna Duran, deputy director of the victims unit at the chief prosecutors’ office, said.

Known as NNs, for ningun nombre, or no name, the forgotten dead are among the most-tragic victims of Colombia’s long-running conflict. Many are believed to have been combatants themselves but are no less deserving of a Christian burial, said Duran.

Much of the investigative work to date has been concentrated in the eastern plains that the military cleared of rebel influence over the past decade.

Prosecutors say they can speed up the work because of an agreement between the government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc) during peace talks last October.

The accord will compensate victims and facilitate truth-telling, removing the biggest obstacle to a final deal ending the half-century conflict.