ICTY AUTOPSY REPORTS

Summary 

The posting of these Srebrenica Autopsy Reports prepared by ICTY forensic teams which between 1996 and 2001 conducted exhumations throughout the Srebrenica area wherever the existence of execution victims’ mass graves was suspected is an event of extraordinary importance to scholars and researchers. This is the only physical evidence of the crime alleged to have taken place during the week after Srebrenica fell to Serbian forces on July 11, 1995: the mass execution in various locations of prisoners of war who are said to have numbered about 8,000.  Before ICTY forensic teams completed their task at suspected Srebrenica execution sites and withdrew in 2001 they exhumed 3,568 “cases” all of which, in due course, will be posted here. Unknown to most, almost half of these “cases” were not equivalent to bodies, although implicitly they were presented as such, but may have consisted of just one or a few disarticulated bones. For a detailed breakdown of these ICTY Autopsy Reports, we refer readers to Chapter VI, “Presentation and interpretation of forensic data (Pattern of injury breakdown)” in our recently published monograph “Deconstruction of a virtual genocide: An intelligent person’s guide to Srebrenica” [Den Haag – Belgrade, 2011] which in pdf. version may be downloaded at: https://www.scribd.com/document/49173947/Deconstruction-of-a-Virtual-Genocide The forensic evidence does not support the execution figure of 7,000 to 8,000 which was adopted by various chambers of the Hague Tribunal. The pattern of injury analysis  demonstrates further that in cases where cause of death can be determined a considerable number of fatal outcomes were due to shrapnel, mines, artillery munitions, and other means that exclude execution and suggest that death occurred in the course of regular combat and not as a result of a criminal act. It suggests also that the huge gap between the several hundred exhumed victims whose pattern of injury may be consistent with the theory of execution and the more than ten times greater figure of those who are claimed to have been executed was made out of whole cloth, without any forensic support. The publication of this material finally makes key evidence in the Srebrenica debate available to the general public and facilitates critical analysis by qualified experts of the key point: based on the forensic evidence, how many deaths in the week after July 11, 1995, may be attributed to the war crime of prisoner execution?

ICTY AUTOPSY REPORTS AND WHAT THEY TELL US

This is a presentation of the results of the forensic analysis performed by expert teams of the Hague Tribunal [ICTY] between 1995 and 2001 at several locations in the region of Eastern Bosnia after they exhumed and examined human remains from 13 locales which were presumed to contain Srebrenica victims.

Post-mortem examinations were conducted on the remains of victims from the following mass graves: Glogova, Kozluk, Konjević Polje, Hodžići   Road, Nova Kasaba, Pilica, Ravnice, Zeleni Jadar, Lazete, Cerska, Liplje, Dam and Čančari Road. At the very start, it would be useful to state the following. Asked by the defense in the Popović et al. case[1] whether it would be relevant to try to determine how many Moslems perished as a result of combat activity, prosecution military expert Richard Butler replied:

“It would be relevant if the forensic evidence of mass graves were showing evidence that would reflect that the bodies in those graves reflected combat casualties. The forensic evidence, as I understand it, coming out of those mass graves reflects the opposite, that they are not combat casualties.”[2]

Nevertheless, a little further on in the cross examination by the defense, Butler admitted that it would be a reasonable assumption that “between 1,000 and 2,000” Moslems could have died as a result of combat activity.[3] A careful analysis of the forensic material that follows that had been prepared by experts of the same Office of the Prosecutor where Butler worked indicates that—contrary to Butler’s claim—a significant number of casualties did indeed originate in combat activity and therefore does not fit into the execution scenario.

Hypothesis

This presentation of the forensic data is based on the following working hypothesis. If the prevalent view, that in Srebrenica about 8,000 captives were summarily shot, were correct then we should expect to find all or the overwhelming majority of the human remains in the various Srebrenica-related mass graves to exhibit a pattern of injury consistent with execution, at least whenever such a pattern is discernible. That hypothesis can now be tested against the available data which consist of autopsy reports created by the forensic specialists of the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. If that hypothesis were correct we should reasonably expect to find a pattern of injury which is generally uniform and broadly consistent with the theory of execution.

Material used for the purposes of this analysis

A total of 3,568 cases were analysed. One case does not necessarily equal one body and may be no more than a couple of arbitrarily selected disarticulated bones. This is the sum total of material gathered by the prosecution of the Hague Tribunal at 13 different Srebrenica-related locations between 1996 and 2001.

Each of these locations is discussed separately, and for each of them the pertinent data are presented in the form of a graph which provides a clearer insight into the results. In order to make the results easily understandable, they were divided into nine classes of casualties:
First: bodies with a bullet in both the upper and the lower region.
Second: bodies with a bullet only in the upper region.
Third: bodies with a bullet only in the lower region.
Fourth: bodies which in addition to bullet traces contain also traces of various kinds of metal fragments.
Fifth: bodies which contain only metal fragments of various kinds.
Sixth: various body parts or fragments, i. e. cases where what was exhumed was not a body but only a few bones, in some instances just one bone.
Seventh: incomplete bodies,  i.e. reports which describe only the upper or lower region of the body, or only the cranium.
Eighth: bodies without a finding as to the cause of death.
Ninth: bodies with blindfolds and/or ligatures.

Our  principal function was to note and classify the findings of the forensic experts hired by the  ICTY Office of the Prosecutor. Those forensic specialists had direct access to the exhumed human remains which form the subject of the autopsy reports that follow. Thus, for instance, when it is stated in the comments in any of the autopsy reports that “the cause of death was not determined,” that is not our conclusion but that of the Hague Tribunal experts who actually conducted the autopsies.
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[1] The third multiple defendant Srebrenica-related trial, focusing mainly on military security service officers and high level field commanders. The trial judgment was announced on June 10, 2010. Judgment and related legal documents are located at: http://www.icty.org/case/popovic/4#tjug
[2] Popovic et al,  23 January, 2008, Transcript 20250
[3] Ibid., Transcript 20251, lines 6-8

Data summary

There is a total of 3,568 autopsy reports in the material that was reviewed. That is the total number of autopsy reports that were available to the Hague Tribunal and tendered into evidence as of 2010. It must be pointed out that this figure represents 3,568 autopsy reports, which is not in every instance the same  as an actual body. The principle is clear: one report does not equal one body. In almost 44,4 % of the reports only a body part, often just a bone, is involved. Considering that a human body consists of over 200 bones, it is obvious why an autopsy report here may not be considered as the equivalent of a body. The corollary to the above is that the number of actual bodies must be far less than the number of reports, a fact which can easily be noticed by reviewing the data for the mass burial sites and the graphs which accompany each of them.

To make the results as analytically accessible as possible, they were divided into five groups. The first group consists of bodies and body parts where blindfolds and/or ligatures were found.  The second group includes bodies where only a bullet or bullet fragments and injuries consistent with their impact were found. Such injuries could have been inflicted either during combat or as a result of execution.

The third group consists of bodies which did not have just bullet injuries, but also metal fragments of projectiles other than bullets (such as shells or mortars) as well as bodies with various metal fragments only. The injuries sustained by this group are mostly consistent with combat activity. The fourth group consists of  incomplete bodies where no cause of death could be determined.

The fifth, and largest group, consists of reports where only a few body fragments were found, often just a single bone, or a foot encased in a boot, a thigh, or the like. In this category there are 1,583 reports out of the total of 3,568, or 44,4 %. This figure acquires greater significance when it is considered that in these reports, where only a body fragment was found, in 92,4 %  of the cases no determination of the cause of death was made by Tribunal forensic experts.

Discussion

Based on the post-mortem reports that were reviewed and on the classification of the data they contain, the following professionally responsible conclusions may be drawn about the manner and causes of death of these victims:

1. The first group consists of 442 bodies on or about which blindfolds and/or ligatures were found, which indicates that those persons may have been executed;
2. There are 655 case which are treated in the autopsy reports as bullet-inflicted. Based on that circumstance alone it is impossible to conclude whether they might have been executed or were killed during combat, or whether death was the consequence of another cause, e.g. suicide. However, based on close pattern of injury analysis (based on Tribunal autopsy reports) of about 150 of these victims it may be said with a high degree of certainty that their death was not caused by a gunshot bullet. The reason for that conclusion is  the peculiar characteristics of the reported pattern of injury in these cases. The dimensions of bone damage and the pronounced bone fragmentation are more consistent with the impact of a projectile launched from the „Praga“   or a similar weapon than with the impact of an ordinary bullet.[4];
3. With respect to 477 of the  victims,  it would be reasonable to conclude that they were not executed, because of the presence of shrapnel and other metal fragments which are not bullet-related or whose origin was not reliably established. Such a pattern of injury is more consistent with combat activity, e.g. during the breakout of the 28th Division column from Srebrenica to Tuzla, rather than with execution, as the probable cause of death;
4. For 411 bodies it was impossible to determine whether or not death was caused by execution, because those bodies were incomplete. In this group are also bodies which did not exhibit traces of projectiles of any kind, and for that reason as well the cause of death could not be determined;
5. The last, and largest single group, totaling 1,583 cases, consists of reports which refer to a few bones only. Based on such autopsy reports it is impossible to draw any forensically significant conclusions, the more so since in a high percentage of these reports  no trauma is referred to. This view is confirmed by the fact that in 92,4 % of the cases in this category, Tribunal forensic experts did not state any cause of death determination.

The initial hypothesis, derived from the prevalent view of Srebrenica events, that all or most of the exhumed remains would exhibit a pattern of injury consistent with execution, was not borne out. Instead of the expected uniformity, there is great diversity in the patterns of injury, which is consistent with more than a single explanation of the mortal outcome.

Control Analysis

Regardless of the fact that these results are very clear, we thought that it would be in the general interest to conduct a parallel, or control, analysis because the previous procedure did not give a definitive answer about the total number of victims in Srebrenica mass graves. Because of the enormous number of post-mortem reports which consist of only a handful of bones, we sought another convenient way to check the results. We therefore decided to conduct an additional analysis. Our basic objective was to establish as closely as possible the total number of bodies in the mass graves which were exhumed by ICTY prosecution forensic experts and for which they composed autopsy reports which were tendered into evidence and formed the basis for several ICTY court decisions about the total number of Srebrenica victims. Once we have a fairly reliable total figure, with some degree of confidence we can then proceed to classify the victims as probably executed or as probably having been killed in combat.

The parameters we used were the total number of craniums and femurs. Since in a significant number of cases the craniums were smashed or fragmented, sometimes into more than 20 individual pieces, that approach proved impractical and was abandoned. We then concentrated on counting the femurs. In the course of our research, we counted all the right and left femurs, as well as femur fragments whenever it was possible to determine whether they belonged to the right or the left femur bone. For a small number of fragments (a total of 28) that was not possible, due to their insufficient size.

As the attached table demonstrates, control results are entirely consistent with the preceding analysis. Both approaches yield a total of fewer than 2,000 bodies in the thirteen mass graves, or between 1,919 and 1,923.

We stress that this total figure of victims for all Srebrenica mass graves includes both key categories, those who were executed and those who were killed during combat engagements. Thus, the thesis which we put forward in our main study, that the considerable number of reports [44,4%] which consist only of fragments cannot legitimately be treated as bodies, now stands fully corroborated. To repeat, the number of those reports which only refer to fragments is 1,583. When we deduct that number [1,583] from the total number of “cases” for which Tribunal forensic experts have opened autopsy reports [3,568], we are left with about 1,985 bodies in various states of completeness. Within acceptable parameters, that coincides with the results of our control analysis which relies on femur bones and which gives us a range of between 1,919 and 1,923 casualties from all causes in Srebrenica-related mass graves.

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[4] For example, cranial defects greater than 10 cm or fragmentation of the scapula with the fracture of six ribs. In forensic terminology, injuries such as these are characterized as “burst out” wounds which, in most cases, would rule out an ordinary bullet.