Sarajevo Football Match Massacre: Direct Perpetrators Remain Free

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.

By June 1993, the war in Sarajevo had already been going on for over a year. Ballian recalled that children had been kept inside for 13 months since the beginning of siege of the city by Bosnian Serb forces, but then there was a pause in the violence.

"That was a short period of calm and children began to gather and play football. They became carefree. At some stage we forgot that we were in a siege," he said.

The first shell was fired at around 10 o'clock in the morning, he continued.

"There was a loud rumbling - we immediately felt that this was large calibre artillery… a couple of seconds after the tremors caused by the shells, panic broke out in the [nearby] square, women and children were running, there were people who were heavily wounded and people with lesser injuries," he said.

Ballian was a head teacher and said that his students were watching the game.

"Then I started looking for them. My nephew Marko Zizic was there, among others. I was also his head teacher," he said.

"I ran from the square to the playground, which was about 100 metres away, but it seemed like an eternity, my legs were weak, I could hardly move. When I arrived there, I saw corpses on the ground."

He said that the second shell that hit the parking lot killed more people than the first one.

"After the first shell, lots of people came running towards the injured to help them. The second grenade was fired to kill them,...