Siege of Sarajevo

The Bosnian prosecution said on Friday that it has begun a probe after media in the country published video from a documentary film made in 1992 by French journalist Philippe Buffon about snipers operating in Sarajevo during the siege of the city.

American photojournalist Mark H. Milstein spent May 19, 1993 cruising around Sarajevo with a Japanese freelance TV cameraman and an American journalist. It was more than a year after the siege of the city by Serb forces had begun, and they decided to check out the front line around the Vrbanja Bridge.

The commission was founded as an attempt to "offer a more balanced depiction of the events in Sarajevo based on facts", the report says. It was chaired by Israeli historian and writer Raphael Israeli, a professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

The Cantonal Court in Sarajevo has convicted Veljko Papic, the wartime commander of the Third Company of the Bosnian Serb Army's Sarajevo-Romanija Corps' First Battalion, of giving orders forcing non-Serb civilians to do hard labour and putting them in life-threatening situations on the front lines in besieged Sarajevo during wartime.

The Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals in The Hague on Wednesday turned down a request for release on probation from Stanislav Galic, a wartime general and commander of the Bosnian Serb Army's Sarajevo-Romanija Corps, who is serving a life sentence for crimes against humanity in a German prison.

Families of the dead, survivors of the shelling, Bosnian politicians and representatives of war victims' associations laid wreaths on Friday at the site of the massacre at the Markale marketplace to mark its 27th anniversary.

Defence lawyer Senad Dupovac told the Bosnian state court in his closing statement on Friday that numerous witnesses at the trial of Senad Dzananovic and Edin Gadzo had given contradictory statements, and called for an acquittal.

The Minister for Veterans' Affairs of Sarajevo Canton, Hajrudin Grabovica, and the president of the Association of Parents of Children Killed during the Siege of Sarajevo 1992-95, Fikret Grabovica, signed a co-financing agreement on Thursday to establish the new Bijela Soba (White Room) memorial space dedicated to the memory of children killed during the war in Sarajevo.

Former Bosnian Serb political leader Radovan Karadzic and the wartime commander of the Bosnian Serb Army's Sarajevo-Romanija Corps, Stanislav Galic, have both been convicted by the Hague Tribunal of having command responsibility for the attack, but none of the direct perpetrators of the shelling have faced justice yet.

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Witness statement by Rialda Musaefendic. Photo: Screenshot

Click to enlarge
Witness statement by Rialda Musaefendic. Photo: Screenshot

Twenty-eight of her colleagues were injured in the shelling of the RTV building, and one lost his life.