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PRISTINA -- Yugoslav forensic pathologists were in Pristina on Thursday allowed only to view but not to examine the bodies recovered from the Ugljare mass grave, according to the head of the Yugoslav team on Friday.
Dr Branislav Denovic of the University of Nis, southeast Serbia (Yugoslavia), told TANJUG that it has been established with certainty, however, that the victims were Serbs, believed to have been massacred by ethnic Albanian terrorists.
Foreign examiners whom the U.S. battalion of the international KFor force in Serbia's U.N.-secured Kosovo-Metohija province had allowed to examine the bodies first, while the discovery was still kept from the world, made a series of blunders, Denovic averred.
"From the point of view of medical science and expertise, we cannot answer many of the questions concerning the sex, age, height of the victims, or time of death.
"We have no evidence on which to base identification. In most cases, the clothes have been removed and cannot be used for identification purposes.
"The bodies have putrefied to a point where they are like lumps of clay from which bones protrude," Denovic said.
"There is a discrepancy between the number of bodies found in Ugljare, municipality of Gnjilane, and the number of body-bags transported to Pristina. In Gnjilane there were 15 bodies, now there are 14. One body is missing.
"The minute or two that we were allowed for each body was enough to establish that nine of the bodies were those of grown men. It is quite certain that there are no children among the victims.
"In five of the cases it can be stated with certainty that the victims were not ethnic Albanians, because they were not circumcised.
"In four of the bodies, the skull was damaged in ways suggestive of wounds inflicted from firearms. Multiple skull fractures indicate wounds inflicted at point-blank range," Denovic specified.
He went on to say that "foreign officials' insistence on DNA testing is just going through the motions, because it is well known that there is no DNA data bank in Yugoslavia, which means that this test is useless here."
He stressed that the Yugoslav team in Pristina on Thursday was not allowed to take teeth impressions or tissue samples.
"We were told that families would be called in, but nobody would or could tell us how many families and which families should come to help with the identification, assuming identification to be possible at all," he added.