Back A recent effort to connect Bosnian refugees in Metro St. Louis with the victims of a massacre more then a decade ago in Europe drew a large turnout, according to the coordinator of the event. Kathy Lass of the St. Louis Chapter of the American Red Cross last week told the Southside Bosnian Services Collaborative that 300 blood samples were taken by an international organization trying to identify the victims of the 1995 massacre of Bosnian men and boys in the town of Srebrenica. Several thousand were killed in that one incident during the civil war that engulfed the former Yugoslavia. The four-day trip to St. Louis by a team of the International Committee on Missing Persons was the second venture into St. Louis –the home of the second largest concentration of Bosnians in the US. A second team that was gathering blood samples for DNA testing in Chicago two years earlier came to St. Louis for one day, Lass said. The Red Cross was joined by the International Institute of Metropolitan St. Louis and St. Louis University in getting a team of researchers to return to St. Louis. The turnout of Bosnians willing to donate samples surprised everyone, Lass said. “From (the team’s) point of view, I think it was very, very successful,” she said. “We kept them busy.” Headquartered in Sarajevo, which was the capitol of Yugoslavia, the International Committee for Missing Persons has quickly built a reputation. “They’re at the top of the chart, technology-wise,” Lass said. The organization was involved in victim identification in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in New York City and the December 2004 tsunami that killed thousands in Asia and parts of Africa. “They are in demand all over the world, wherever there’s a disaster,” she said. The Southside Bosnian Services Collaborative is a gathering of various government agencies, private business and community organizations aimed at providing services or information to the Bosnian refugees. It meets about every six weeks at St. Margaret of Scotland Catholic Church at 3854 Flad Ave. Father Tom Wyrsch, pastor of St. Margaret, is Chairman of the Collaborative. ### This story may be available for an Adobe Acrobat PDF download. Click on the link below to visit the site download center. If a PDF is available, the file will automatically open in your browser.

Print