SEVERAL thousand Bosnian Muslims missing since rebel Serbs overran the UN designated enclave of Srebrenica last July are dead, the UN Rapporteur for Human Rights, Ms Elisabeth Rehn, said in Bratunac yesterday.
Ms Rehn said she had been informed by a Serb official in the region, Mr Mireslav Deronic, that the Muslims, numbering between 3,000 and 8,000 according to different estimates, had been "killed in battle" and were "buried around (the Srebrenica region)".
She was speaking to reporters after paying a visit to the former enclave, now in Serb hands where she spent two hours questioning Mr Deronic extensively on the thousands of missing Muslims, exclusively male.
The men, held to be of fighting age, were rounded up and are believed to have been massacred after the collapse of the enclave on July 11th.
Ms Rehn stressed however that Mr Deronic did not confirm that massacres had taken place, or admit the existence of mass graves.
The US Secretary of State, Mr Warren Christopher said yesterday the Serbian President Mr Slobodan Milosevic, had given his approval for the opening in Belgrade of an international tribunal for war crimes in former Yugoslavia.
Speaking after a meeting with Mr Milosevic lasting several hours, Mr Christopher said officials of the war crimes tribunal in The Hague would be authorised to question witnesses and search for evidence in Serbia.
The US is linking co operation by Belgrade in the prosecution of war crimes with the re establishing of relations and provision of aid.
At an air base in Tuzla, US mine experts yesterday looked for answers into the greatest danger facing the peacekeeping troops as the body of the first American soldier killed in Bosnia was flown out on the journey home.
At a small, brief ceremony on the tarmac of the air base, which serves as headquarters for the 16,000 US troops in Bosnia, the body of Sgt Donald Allen Dugan (38), from Belle Center, Ohio, and married with two children, was put on transport plane bound for a US base in Germany.
Sgt Dugan was manning an isolated checkpoint near the former front line close to Gradacac, about 40 km north of Tuzla, when he apparently stepped on a mine, military officials said.
He was flown by helicopter to a mobile hospital near Zupanja, Croatia, but was declared dead on arrival Six Nato soldiers, three British, two Portuguese and one Italian were killed in mine related incidents in Bosnia in the past two weeks.