Thread by @kimwillsher1

In April 1996, @lynnhiltonphoto and I went to Bosnia to try to find out the identity of a woman photographed hanging from a tree after Srebrenica. The picture went around the world, but at the time she was known only as "The Hanging Woman". I felt she we should know her name.

With the help of Bosnian researchers, we were able to give her a name: Ferida Osmanovic. She was 31. Her husband, Selman, 37, had been taken away by Bosnian Serb forces led by General Ratko Mladic and massacred. More than 8,000 men and boys were killed.

We also found Ferida and Selman's orphaned children, Damir, 13, and Fatima, 10, who were staying with relatives in a village outside Tuzla and spoke to them about their mother. It was one of the saddest interviews I have ever done - and I have done a few.

Fatima told us: "We know our mother hanged herself. We went to her grave, but it had no name, just "Hanged" on the wooden headboard. So we wrote her name on it in felt-tip pen".

Damir remembered the night his mother disappeared: "It was our second night at the camp and our mother put us to bed. We were sleeping on the tarmac with blankets. She said she loved us, said goodnight, and lay down next to us. Then I woke up at midnight and she wasn't there..."

His distraught mother had slipped away to the nearby Grabovda wood, plaited her black cloth belt with a brown shawl into a noose and slipped it around her neck. the next day, 17 July, at 7.30am, her body was found by a group of children.

"We don't have a father and now we have no mother," the children said. Everyone in the room cried buckets.

You will not find this story anywhere. It was published in the Mail on Sunday on 14 April 1996 before the internet and has never been uploaded anywhere. I have a yellowing cutting of the story but I don't need it to remember the terrible details.

Why am I recounting this now?
Because Ratko Mladic, the so-called Butcher of the Balkans, and the man behind the Srebrenica massacre has lost his appeal against a 2017 conviction for genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.

He will rot in jail and so he should for what he did.
"The Hanging Woman" - was only one of thousands and thousands of victims of the Balkan wars, but her picture became symbolic of the horror of Bosnia.
I am glad Lynn Hilton @lynnhiltonphoto and I were able to give her a name.

* The children were later interviewed by a Guardian colleague. This article wrongly states they were visited by a US journalist.
theguardian.com/world/2005/apr…

And here is the yellowing cutting with the terrible photograph.

I should also add that we did NOT show those children the photograph as this article suggests.

The original photograph was taken by AP's Darko Bandic.