Scores of bodies found at Perucac Lake

The remains of scores of civilians from the 1992 Visegrad killings in Bosnia have been found in Perucac lake. Channel 4 News’ chief correspondent Alex Thomson, who reported from Visegrad during the 90s, writes that the ‘bloody river’ contains secrets from many a war – including  Hitler’s ill-timed Bosnia adventure.  For too, too long now, local people have simply called it “the bloody river”.

The Drina snakes its way through the central mountains of the former Yugoslavia, forming a deep, natural frontier between Serbia and Bosnia. And I use the word “snakes” advisedly – but more on that a little later.

The reason for the bloody tag is that, as anyone in this area will tell you, it has for generations now been used as a place where dark secrets can be hidden, hopefully forever.

And those dark secrets are people. The bodies of people. Of Nazi soldiers killed during Hitler’s ill-timed Bosnia adventure. Tied down in these mountains, the Wehrmacht were fatally late pushing east for Moscow – and got Stalingrad instead.

So these deep waters and high limestone mountains hide many secrets to this day – through the more recent Balkan wars to the short but vicious war over Kosovo.

Which is why – now they have to repair a key hydroelectric dam – the river is yielding some of its secrets: the bodies.

They’ve had to radically lower the water level of Perucac Lake.

The engineers have been joined by teams flown in by helicopter from The International Commission for Missing Persons.

It is not easy work. I mean it is not simply the business of unearthing human bodies in various stages of saturated decomposition from the mud and slime of a lake (though that would put off most of us) but, this being a former war zone, the place is littered with unexploded ordnance from grenades through to full-scale anti-tank mines.

Difficult, painstaking and slow work. But their time is limited. The work on the dam cannot wait, in less than a month the waters will be rising once again.

Plenty of people of course remain desperate to find out what happened to their missing loved ones from nearby Visegrad (pictured above)…Srebrenica of course…then forward to the conflict in Kosovo where it is believed Serb forces took bodies in refrigerated trucks to this area to sink them in the deep waters of “the bloody river”.

They have already found scores of bodies. Some, they are already certain, are those of Wehrmacht soldiers, still with preserved skeletons in the cold mud and silt of the deep mountain lake.

Others are clearly more recently deposited, either into the water of the lake itself, or further upstream in the Drina, to drift south and eventually come to rest in the hydro dam at Perucac.

As for the snakes? Well that is something else this area is famed for in the summer months. Just another hazard to be taken into account if you are out with the body searchers from the Commission.

Though snakes – it must be said — get out of your way if they possibly can and generally want nothing but peace, unlike the soldiers and irregular forces who have killed their way up and down this valley for generations.