"My people, I cannot sleep!": the man who, years later, showed investigators the grave at Tomašica

Prijedor, 1992

In the municipality of Prijedor in 1992, hundreds of Bosniaks and Croats were killed. The victims were buried in a mass grave at the Tomašica mine site. According to the indictment in the trial of Ratko Mladić, the Vojska Republike Srpske (VRS) was responsible for the crimes in Prijedor.

The story of how the grave was found was told by Amor Mašović, who for many years led the search for missing persons in Bosnia and Herzegovina. According to him, the man who later became an informant served in civil protection in Prijedor in 1992. Together with a colleague, he collected the bodies of murdered Bosniaks, Croats, Albanians and Roma – in front of houses, inside houses, in barns and in fields. As Mašović related, the bodies were collected on the same day as the killing or the day after and loaded onto a truck: one man took hold of the arms, the other of the legs.

A face that would not fade

According to Mašović's account, a colleague once turned over a body that was lying face down, and the murdered man had his eyes open. That face, he said, stayed with him for years – he saw it every time he closed his eyes. "My people, I cannot sleep!", he told the investigators, as Mašović relates.

According to Mašović, this man came forward to investigators in Sanski Most, refused any reward – money, or even a lunch or a coffee – and led them to Tomašica. The sources do not state the year in which he came forward.

The British television network ITV reported that in April 2013 a former Serb soldier came forward who in 1992 had been part of a group that hid bodies, because he could no longer live with a sense of guilt. The sources do not say whether this is the same person Amor Mašović speaks of.

Discovery and exhumation in 2013

In August 2013, the authorities of Bosnia and Herzegovina uncovered at Tomašica one of the largest primary mass graves of the war. Forensic teams, with the participation of the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP), exhumed about 150 bodies by mid-October, an average of ten per day.

Figures on the number of victims differ depending on the source. According to testimonies, the grave contained up to 1,000 bodies in the summer of 1992. According to data presented by the ICMP, the remains of 385 persons were exhumed from Tomašica in 2013, and another 211 persons had previously been found at the nearby site of Jakarina kosa, to which bodies were moved after the war – a total of 596 victims. According to Amor Mašović, 670 victims were found thanks to the informant.

Evidence before the court

In June 2015, the ICMP's forensic director Thomas Parsons testified as a prosecution witness in the retrial of the accused Ratko Mladić. Most of the victims from Tomašica were identified through DNA analysis. In this way, evidence from the grave, to which the testimony of a man who could not sleep had led, reached the court in The Hague.