The remains of a Croatian soldier were identified at the Forensic Institute in Zagreb on Thursday and the remains of nine more civilian victims are expected to be identified in the next few weeks.

The soldier whose remains were identified on Friday was Tomislav Milic, who was killed at the age of 29 after he had joined the defence of the eastern Croatian town of Vukovar in 1991 as a reservist. The remains were exhumed in the village of Bogdanovci last year.

Speaking to the press on Friday, Veterans’ Affairs Minister Tomo Medved said that  Croatia was still searching for 1,868 people who had gone missing during the war, adding that the identification of nine more civilian casualties would be carried out at the Forensic Institute before the end of this month.

Furthermore, the identification of six war victims is to be completed in the eastern Croatian city of Osijek next week, the minister said, adding that of those victims, two were soldiers and four were civilians.

Croatia is continuing looking for the missing, the minister said and added that the Croatian authorities and the Medical School in Zagreb had provided a new laboratory at the Forensic Institute with state-of-the-art equipment that would enable the identification of the remains that could not be identified before.

Despite the fact that in the past five years Croatia had forwarded to Belgrade hundreds of requests pertaining to the disappearance of victims and the accurate or presumable time of their death, Serbia had not provided any concrete data or information that could help locate and exhume the bodies, the minister said.

Medved claimed that this was a political decision by the Serbian authorities and recalled that Belgrade possessed documents about the war activities of the Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA) in Vukovar during its siege in the early 1990s.

Medved called on the authorities in Belgrade to provide information on where the people killed in Vukovar and still listed as missing were buried.

The head of the Federation of Families of Imprisoned and Missing Croatian Soldiers, Ljiljana Alvir, said that the families hoped that Serbia would allow access to its archives.

She also called on people in Croatia who “bear the burden of knowledge” about graves and mass graves and about what had happened in the war to tell the bereaved families and help them find their loved ones.