Lugansk, Nov 2 - DAN. Experts of the inter-departmental commission on the search for missing persons have exhumed the remains of 41 unidentified victims of the Donbass conflict since August, Donetsk People’s Republic ombudswoman Darya Morozova who chairs the commission told reporters on Tuesday.
“Over three months of work in the DPR, we’ve exhumed the remains of 41 people. They were sent to a forensic bureau for examination,” Morozova said. “We have some ideas regarding (the identification - eds Donetsk News Agency) of 15 people, but we’ll have to wait for the forensic lab report in order to state precisely how many people we had been able to identify.”
The Commission plans to exhume the remains of unidentified war victims at 16 locations in the DPR, she added.
Lugansk is currently hosting an international “round table”meeting over the results of the search for missing persons in Donbass. It is attended by the heads of the Donetsk People’s Republic and the Lugansk People’s Republic, Denis Pushilin and Leonid Pasechnik, chairwoman of the DPR inter-departmental commission on the search for missing persons Darya Morozova, LPR First Deputy Foreign Minister, head of the LPR inter-departmental working group on the search for Ukrainian aggression victims burial sites Anna Soroka and other officials.
In the summer, the DPR and the LPR set up inter-departmental commissions to step up the search for missing persons. They include representatives of the Republics’ leadership, law-enforcement bodies and expert community. The Commission organizes the search for the missing persons, composes a register of the missing, gathers information on them, creates a database of the missing and deceased and their relatives, and coordinates exhumation efforts, identification of bodies and handing them over to relatives.
The first remains were exhumed in Snezhnoye’s Ovsyanoe cemetery on August 19. The Commission then searched for burial sites in Debaltsevo. Experts are reportedly preparing to open a mass grave in Khartsyzsk. *jk