Separate Accounts Detail Killings, Harrowing Escape From Warehouse

Hakija HUSEJNOVIC said he and 2,000 other men surrendered to Bosnian Serb forces near the town of Lolici on July 13 and were marched to a warehouse in the village of Kravica.

Soon after, the soldiers began shooting automatic rifles, firing rocket-propelled grenades, and tossed hand grenades into the warehouse. Husejnovic said he hid under the bodies for 24 hours as the soldiers slowly cleared them away with a bulldozer and put them in trucks that headed toward Bratunac.

When the work paused for the evening, he and another man escaped. Husejnovic crossed into government territory on Sept. 17, having separated from the other man in the journey.

In a separate interview, an elderly man who arrived in government-held territory Sept. 22 and asked not to be named, described seeing trucks filled with decomposed bodies coming from the direction of Kravica in mid-August.

The bodies were being put in a mass grave in a field near the village of Burnice.

The elderly man said he watched the work with a man who had the same first name as Husejnovic said the other survivor had. That man, the elderly man said, told him that he had survived a massacre with one other man in a warehouse in Kravica. The man told the elderly man that 600 prisoners had been killed and that the bodies being buried near Burnice were from the warehouse.

The first name of the individual, believed still in Bosnian Serb territory, is not being given to protect his identity.

His estimate, as given by the elderly man, of 600 prisoners killed differs from Husejnovic's account of 2,000.