Show me his socks ... the desperate plea of a mother in Banja Luka's warehouse of death

Continuing his series from the former Yugoslavia a year after the ceasefire, Robert Fisk shares the horror of identifying a loved one's remains

The Serb coroner held out the skull to Radojka Todorovic. "This is your son's head," he said. "Can you not see the incision over where the right ear was? That was the operation he had on his ear. This is your boy."

Radojka raised both her arms, looked at the skull and then down at the terrible remains at her feet. There was a rib cage partly covered by a rotted T-shirt, a mouldy pair of trousers and a pile of dark flesh. It had lain in the mass grave at Glamoc for almost a year. But Radojka Todorovic ignored both the overpowering stench and Dr Karan's conviction that this pathetic, awful heap was 27-year-old university graduate Radovan Todorovic, her only son. "I want to see his socks," she cried. "I knitted his socks before he went to the front. Show me his socks - then I can identify him."

All around us in the dark and terrible warehouse lay the dead, 107 of them, Serb soldiers and civilians alike, 12 women among them, the oldest aged 90. Most appeared to have had their skulls beaten in or to have been shot at close range. They had been placed in ghostly ranks, numbered according to the mass grave in which the Croatian troops had put them in the last days of the Bosnian war, always supposing the war has ended. It was hot in the warehouse and Dr Karan, the coroner, a thick-bearded giant of a man, held the skull in one hand and swatted the flies from his face with the other.

"You want me to take off the boot?" he asked, his voice rising in irritation. He dearly wanted Radojka to accept that this heap of bones and decayed flesh was Radovan, the earnest, tousled-haired young man whose photograph she carried in her handbag. She was weeping now and her husband, Nicola, tall but head bowed, touched her on the arm. She nodded. Yes, she wanted to see just one sock.

Dr Karan pulled out a long knife and cut away at the mud-caked army boot. Then, with gentle, appalling ease, the foot detached itself from the body and the Serb pulled it out of the boot, cleaning the sock with his knife. Radojka put on her spectacles. "I never knitted that," she said. "I knitted him three pairs of socks but that's not one of them. I know my knitting. That's not a pattern I'd knit. This can't be Radovan."

The coroner was angry now. He had identified 70 bodies and he wanted to be clear of another corpse, to get them all packaged into the cheap wooden coffins piled at the back of the warehouse, each stamped with a black Orthodox cross. "Look, you must understand that soldiers at the front share things," he shouted at Radojka.

"It rains, they get wet, they borrow their colleagues' clothes. It gets cold in the front lines. He must have been wearing someone else's socks. All the men with him were killed. They are around us in this room. The body was found in the right locality. The group he belonged to is the right group. He is the only one unidentified. He had the operation. You have seen the skull."

But Radojka, an image of immense courage and pitiful hope, shook her head. "I knew another boy who had the same operation," she replied. "Why not get the doctor who performed the operation on Radovan and ask him to look at the skull?"

Beside Nicola, the chief Banja Luka police forensic scientist, a young man with a kind face, looked into Radojka's eyes. He and his colleagues had walked through minefields to retrieve the bones of his countrymen, had dug up all these bodies behind the post-war front lines. And he understood the woman's predicament: if she could persuade herself this was not Radovan, she might yet see him alive - but if Radojka were wrong, she would be losing the chance of burying her son.

Dr Karan tried to be reasonable. "The boots are size eight. That is the size of Radovan's boots," he said. "You say you don't recognise the front teeth in the skull. But his military medical report and dental papers say he had fillings on one side of his mouth and that opposite the fillings, his sixth tooth was missing. And the sixth tooth in this skull is missing."

And Dr Karan picked up the skull again, contemplating it like a Serb Hamlet. "Please listen to me, we shall try to help you but we can't do more for you - Radovan and all his comrades were killed. I know it is very difficult for you to face this fact."

Outside the warehouse, it was Nicola who wept while Radojka tried to find comfort in recalling her son's life. Radovan, like most Bosnian Serb university graduates, was among the last to be called up to fight - which was why the brightest died last. "He left home to fight on 21 August," his mother said. "He was captured alive by Croat soldiers on 8 September, at Glamoc. That is what we were told. There was a witness, an old man, though we cannot find him now. Radovan has a mechanical engineering degree from Banja Luka university - he graduated in April last year."

And Radojka rummaged in her handbag for her picture of Radovan. "We left all the other photographs of him behind when we ran away from our home in Sanski Most," she said. "There was a lovely picture of him with his girlfriend, taken on his university graduation day and we have lost it now."

I mentioned that by chance I would be crossing the old front line to Sanski Most in a few days' time, and Radojka's face lit up. "Will you go to our home, please? The address is 14A Braca Jugovic - it used to be called Braca Todorovic. There is a Muslim family in our house now. Will you talk to them and tell them they are not our enemies. But will you ask them, please, if they have the picture of Radovan with his girlfriend? I would so like to have it."

I promised that I would knock on her old front door and ask for the picture. She obviously accepted, in some sense, that Radovan was dead. Indeed, she had acknowledged the fact an hour earlier, when we had found her sitting, head in her hands, outside the coroner's office. "I have had enough of life," she had wailed. "I'm finished. It's over for me. He was such a wonderful boy. They killed the only son I ever had."

Tomorrow: Robert Fisk goes to Sanski Most in search of the missing photograph.