On the International Day of Disappeared, the delegation of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) and the Missing Persons Institute (MPI) of Bosnia and Herzegovina wish to highlight that thousands of persons remain unaccounted for in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Of more than 30,000 missing persons at the end of the conflict, an estimated 13,000 are still missing. Their families continue to live in uncertainty and anguish hoping to receive news regarding the fate of their missing relatives.

The International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) passed a major milestone this week, when it recorded its 10,000th DNA match of persons missing from the conflicts in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH). The 10,000th missing person to be identified using ICMP's unique DNA-led system was a man missing from the fall of Srebrenica in July 1995. The ICMP DNA match report, which indicates the identity of the man with a certainty of 99.95 per cent, will be forwarded to the local court-appointed pathologist, who will conduct an official post-mortem examination and make the final, legal identification. The remains will then be returned to the missing man's family for burial.

The Chairman of the Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Sulejman Tihic, visited the “Cancari Road 10” exhumation site in Kamenica, eastern Bosnia, today, where the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) is providing assistance to the excavation teams representing the Missing Persons Institute.In an effort to identify the missing from conflicts or human rights abuses, one of the most difficult hurdles is often finding the physical location of mass graves. Perpetrators of the crimes have often gone to great lengths to hide the bodies of the dead and many of the mass graves associated with the 1995 fall of Srebrenica were moved to secondary sites. The perpetrators used heavy machinery to move the bodies, which resulted in body parts becoming fragmented and commingled.