Siege of Sarajevo

People gathered to lay flowers and pay their respects on Bakarevica Street in the Bistrik neighbourhood of Sarajevo on Monday, commemorating the 30th anniversary of the deaths of seven young people and children in an artillery attack.

Mersudin Secerovic, whose older brother Sinanudin was killed on June 26, 1993, said that despite the passage of time, "the wounds stay the same".

Pita fainted from shock and later, in hospital, had to listen to her daughter cry while being operated upon without anesthetic because by that time, several months after the start of the war and the siege of Sarajevo, there was a shortage of medical supplies in the city.

Slovenian director Miran Zupanic's latest documentary tells a story of rich foreigners who paid to shoot at people in Sarajevo during the wartime siege - but Bosnian Serb war veterans insist the film is based on a lie.

The defence lawyer for Veljko Papic, the wartime commander of the Third Company of the Bosnian Serb Army's Sarajevo-Romanija Corps' First Battalion, told BIRN that an appeal has been filed against the verdict jailing him for two years for crimes against the civilian population in Sarajevo in 1993 and 1994.

The prosecution has also appealed, asking for a longer sentence.

BIRN on Wednesday launched the '44 Months under Siege' project, which features video interviews with 44 people who lived through the 1992-95 siege of Sarajevo, speaking about the dangers and deprivations of living under the longest military blockade of a capital city in recent times.

Sarajevo's mayor's office shone in the colors of Bulgaria's flag, the first country to recognize Bosnia and Herzegovina's independence 30 years ago, the local daily Dnevni Avaz reported.

"What he talked about as a professional sniper was the tactics of sniping, about the weapons that were used, the sniping locations that the Serb forces used - literally behind this museum - and it's a really chilling account of how a professional sniper looks and how obviously these were deliberate attacks on civilians," Lowe said.

'Watch Out, Sniper', a multimedia exhibition documenting the wartime siege of the Bosnian capital through photographs, research into Hague Tribunal archive material, witness testimonies and 3D modelling, opens at the Historical Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina in Sarajevo on Thursday evening.

Sarajevo mayor Benjamina Karic, accompanied by the top international official in Bosnia and Herzegovina, High Representative Christian Schmidt, and the vice-president of the Federation entity, Milan Dunovic, unveiled the new memorial on Monday and laid flowers next to the Kazani pit where the remains of those killed in 1992 and 1993 were found.

Sarajevo City Council on Wednesday voted to erect a monument to the mostly ethnic Serb civilian victims of the wartime Kazani Pit killings, but rejected a proposal by the Nasa Stranka party to name their killers on the inscription.