November 18, 2001	Sunday	Ramazan 2, 1422

TUZLA (Bosnia), Nov 17: A new DNA-testing system was tried for the first time here on Friday, helping identify two teenagers killed during the country’s 1992-95 war.

The DNA-testing data base, established by the International Committee on Missing Persons (ICMP), was run for the first time “with real samples that are being processed in Bosnia,” Gordon Bacon, head of the ICMP in Bosnia, told a press conference.

“That generated our first DNA-assisted identification,” he added.

The ICMP experts in Bosnia developed sophisticated database software, matching DNA isolated from victims’ bone marrow and blood with that from blood samples of living relatives.

The two teenagers, identified Friday, were killed by Bosnian Serb forces in the Srebrenica massacre, in 1995.

The use of the ICMP’s DNA-testing system was expected to dramatically speed up the identification of the remains exhumed from mass graves throughout Bosnia.

Currently there are more than 6,000 such remains, the majority belonging to victims of the Srebrenica massacre.—AFP