Over three decades after the war, Bosnia and Herzegovina still searches for 7, 588 missing persons. The Missing Persons Institute of Bosnia and Herzegovina (MPI BiH) warns that, to accelerate the process, it is necessary to include contemporary technologies such as ground-penetrating radar (GPR), drones, Search and Rescue (SAR) Dogs, and artificial intelligence for reviewing extensive documentation.
Following the International Day of the Missing Persons, MPI BiH held a press conference today on the plateau in front of the Parliamentary Assembly of Bosnia and Herzegovina, where they appealed to anyone with information about missing persons to submit it to the competent authorities.
Zlatko Tuzlak from the Advisory Board of MPI BiH said that the families of the missing have been waiting for years for information about their loved ones.
“Today, we will send a message, a simple one – finding missing persons is not an institutional matter, but a humane, moral, and civilizational matter of our society,” Tuzlak said.
He emphasized that institutions of Bosnia and Herzegovina must ensure material and technical means that could enable the Institute to conduct an efficient search.
Šimun Novaković from the Board of Directors of the MPI BiH spoke about challenges investigators face due to the passage of time and decreasing number of witnesses. According to him, the Institute must use new methods, including contemporary technologies.
Of course, he said, the Missing Persons Institute cannot rely only on information, but look for other methods, in line with contemporary technologies.
“In the upcoming period, we are expecting a procurement of GPRs, drones, performing surface and subsurface soil investigations, where appropriate software can detect if human remains exist in a certain area, that is, whether the terrain configuration has been disturbed.
Novaković also confirmed that the Institute is in talks with the Missing Persons Agency of the Republic of Serbia about the possibility of testing their GPR in a few locations in Bosnia and Herzegovina, to determine how applicable this technology is to the terrain configuration in our country.
There are also plans to use search dogs, as well as artificial intelligence, to review large volumes of documentation in the Institute’s central records.
“We today cannot say if that method will be successful, but simply, we must try,” Novaković said, speaking about the application of new methods in search of the missing.
As he explained, a particular problem is that many potential witnesses have passed away in the meantime, while information that has previously arrived is now increasingly rare.
For this reason, the Institute, once again, calls for everyone who has any information about the location of the missing to deliver it to the competent institutions, which can be done anonymously.
The Institute also initiated a procedure for allocating 600, 000 BAM in operational funds intended for rewarding information that leads to the finding of the mortal remains.
As explained, the money will be paid out only when the information proves to be accurate and human remains are found.
On the occasion of International Missing Persons Day, an exhibition titled “Where Is He” was opened as a visual reminder of the families’ suffering and the lack of information.
