The techniques developed to identify missing people after the Balkans wars could be used in Iraq to find victims of Saddam Hussein's regime, an Iraqi official said here Tuesday.
Eight Iraqi experts visited the Sarajevo-based International Commission for Missing Persons (ICMP) last week to learn about its experience to locate, recover and identify the missing people, a statement said.
Having seen the ICMP work in Bosnia "we feel confident that what they are doing in Bosnia could be replicated in Iraq," the ICMP statement quoted Ezzat Mohammed Sulaiman, of the Kurdistan region's ministry of martyrs, as saying.
The effort could help "to bring some resolution to our massive problem of missing persons," he added referring to hundreds of thousands who went missing during the Saddam Hussein's dictatorship.
Estimates of the number of missing in Iraq range between 250,000 and 1.5 million, while the Medico-Legal Institute there uses a working figure of 360,000 missing persons.
The ICMP opened an office in Baghdad in 2008 to provide training to staff members of the institute and the human rights ministry in best practice techniques for the excavation of mass graves, the statement said.
The ICMP identification project has already assisted US forensic experts in identifying victims of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York as well as Hurricane Katrina.
The commission's experts also assisted in identifying victims of the deadly tsunami that hit Asia in 2004.
The ICMP project was developed in the Balkans in an attempt to discover the fate of some 40,000 missing people, mostly from Bosnia, following the conflicts the accompanied the break-up of the former Yugoslavia.
So far, 15,000 remains have been identified through DNA analyses.
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