Walking through the woods above his home near Kravica, Nukic has found remains and personal belongings that have helped identify about 300 of the 1,000 to 1,500 victims who are thought to have died there in July 1995.
They compose just a fraction of the more than 8,000 Muslim men and boys who were killed by Bosnian Serb troops in the Srebrenica genocide.
"It has become my quest," the 59-year-old father of five told Reuters, explaining that he began the search 15 years ago hoping to find the remains of his father, uncle, and two brothers who went missing after the massacre.
"When I find a bone, it’s for me as if I found the whole body. I know some mother will get peace," Nukic said, showing a human skull and a bone he found in the forest a couple of weeks ago.
He passes his discoveries on to investigators from the Institute for Missing Persons, who then match the human remains with DNA samples donated by the relatives of the missing in order to identify them.
The massacre took place 25 years ago this month, during the Bosnian War of the 1990s. Bosnian Serb forces commanded by General Ratko Mladic attacked the eastern enclave of Srebrenica, where about 40,000 Bosnian Muslims had found shelter in a "safe zone" under United Nations protection.
After Srebrenica fell into Serb hands on July 11, 1995, most of the women and children were separated from men and bused to territory controlled by the Bosnian Army. The remaining men and boys were killed, while most of those who tried to escape through the woods were captured, detained, and executed.
The United Nations war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia established that the killings constituted genocide, and convicted Mladic and his political mentor Radovan Karadzic of genocide and other war crimes in Srebrenica.
After the Serbs attacked Srebrenica, Nukic sent his family to the UN-protected camp in nearby Potocari while he joined 15,000 men on an escape march through the woods.
Nukic survived and was the only one who returned in 2002 to his village. He found the first skeleton while cleaning his ruined house.
"About 130 men who were killed here are still unaccounted-for,” he told Reuters at the site of the killings. “I will not give up searching until the last one of them is found."
