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More than 200 World War II-era mass graves confirmed in Serbia
Jun 16, 2011, 15:20 GMT
Belgrade - A Serbian commission has confirmed the execution of 25,000 people by Communist partisans during the closing days of World War II, a commission official said Thursday.
The commission, set up in 2009 to determine the number of people killed by the Communist partisan army, has found 200 sites containing multiple victims since it began working 18 months ago, said commission secretary Srdjan Cvetkovic at a news conference.
During the war, the partisan army summarily executed tens of thousands. Though the victims included captured German and other foreign soldiers, 'domestic traitors' and 'collaborators' accounted for most of those killed.
World War II-era mass graves are found regularly throughout the former Yugoslavia, sometimes with the remains of thousands of bodies.
Serbian historians estimate the number of victims from the final year of the war at more than 80,000, many of them killed without trial and buried in unmarked graves.
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