Bosnian Serbs Exposed at NATO-Hit Locations Died of Cancer
http://www.centraleurope.com/news.php3?id=260319

PALE, Jan 19, 2001 -- (Agence France Presse) Three Bosnian Serb soldiers who were deployed near locations bombed during NATO's 1994-95 intervention in Bosnia, plus a boy who lived near the bombed areas, have died of cancer, a Bosnian Serb officer told AFP Thursday.

Officer Srdjan Trifkovic, told AFP that Goran Tesanovic and his mate, whose name Trifkovic could not remember, had died of leukemia while the third soldier, Vaso Rajcevic, died of lung cancer.

The statement could not be independently verified.

Trifkovic said the three were deployed at the Jahorina mountain, near Sarajevo, and died within the past two years. They were collecting the remains of shells fired by NATO in autumn 1995 and selling them.

Trifkovic, also deployed at Jahorina at the time, added that a six-year-old boy, Nebojsa Tesanovic, who had lived near a bombed location at Jahorina, died of leukemia in 1998.

The boy was probably playing in a crater or may have been collecting the remains as well, Trifkovic said.

However he could not confirm whether munitions found contained depleted uranium (DU) but added that "judging by impacts on the metal surface of radars (at Jahorina), the weapons were not conventional."

Trifkovic also warned of a number of cancer cases among civilian population exposed to NATO's bombing.

At two refugee centers in Jahorina, accommodating some 400 Bosnian Serbs, some one dozen people were suffering from cancer, he claimed.

Most of them are refugees from the Serb-held suburbs of Sarajevo, bombed by NATO and they could have been exposed to radiation during airstrikes, he added.

The NATO-led Stabilization Force (SFOR) said earlier Thursday that radiation tests conducted outside Sarajevo where DU munition was discovered indicated no health hazard for humans.

However, a doctor at a hospital in the Serb Sarajevo suburb of Kasindol told journalists that some people in the Serb-held areas around Sarajevo suffered of two types of cancer at the same time.

Doctor Trifko Guzina gave the example of 35-year-old Zeljko Samardzic, from Pale, outside Sarajevo, who had both adrenal gland and colon cancer.

Changes registered on his brain, skin and nails indicate the presence of toxic substances in his body, Guzina said, without elaborating. ((c) 2001 Agence France Presse)