BOSNIA: SARAJEVO: HEAVY SHELLING OF CITY

(7 May 1995) Natural Sound


At least seven people have been killed and fifteen injured in the worst Serb shelling of the Bosnian capital since the four month-old ceasefire ended last Monday.

The attack was apparently in revenge for rebel Serb defeats in neighbouring Croatia.

Three shells hit the government-held suburb of Dobrinja, and 10 badly wounded people were brought to the city's main hospital.

UN personnel and aid convoys have also been targeted throughout Bosnia in what seems to be Serb retaliation for UN inaction during a Croatian army blitz on Serb enclaves in Eastern Croatia.

SUGGESTED VOICE-OVER:

Serb forces tighten their squeeze on the besieged Bosnian capital of
Sarajevo.

They blasted the suburbs of Butmir and Dobrinja with mortar shells, killing at least eight people and injuring 15 others.

Butmir is the last government-held town west of the Sarajevo airport. At least one of the shells hit near the entrance to a tunnel under the airport that is a vital lifeline from the rest of government-held Bosnia to Sarajevo.

Fellow Serbs in Croatia suffered defeat at the hands of a surprise Croatian army attack recently, and the UN are saying that attacks on civilians in Sarajevo and UN targets elsewhere in Bosnia, are in retaliation for that.

Bosnia's prime minister says as many as 40 people are hurt.

He says the attack is part of a Serbian effort to strangle Sarajevo and stop humanitarian aid from getting in.

SOUNDBITE:
So the genocide of the Bosnian people and Bosnia continues. This all has one goal and that is to completely strangulate Sarajevo and close it for humanitarian aid; so we are going to have a big humanitarian crisis in Sarajevo very soon.
SUPER-CAPTION: HARIS SILAJDZIC - BOSNIAN PRIME MINISTER

Serb leader Radovan Karadzic has vowed to block U.N. operations because the United Nations failed to stop the Croatian offensive.

The United Nations was denied permission for convoys to travel across Serb-held territory in Bosnia on Sunday.

Several U.N. peacekeepers have been shot and killed in the past several weeks, including a Ukrainian soldier Friday.

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