Thousands of Bosnians Flee Captured Town

A defeated army and thousands of fleeing civilians from the Bosnian town of Jajce poured into Travnik on Saturday after a three-day, 25-mile journey.

In the early morning mist, horses sagged under their human riders, most of whom appeared to be non-Serbs. Hollow-eyed and disheveled soldiers held the reins.

Trucks, tractors and armored vehicles rumbled into the town, along with wagons drawn by mules. Beside them the exiles plodded in an endless procession, half of them soldiers with grenades dangling from their belts and rifles hanging from their shoulders or dragging along the ground.

Peasants with cows scrambled into ditches when a Croatian armored vehicle piled high with soldiers passed along the narrow road leading into the town.

The refugees say they have left behind a burning town that fell to the Serbs on Thursday after a five-month siege and relentless artillery barrage.

They came by the thousands--20,000 by some estimates, others say many more--a ragged assortment of pale and exhausted soldiers and women, children and old people flooding into Travnik, about 40 miles from Sarajevo.

Many of the fleeing soldiers were Croats who defended Jajce for five months in what has become a volatile relationship with the Muslims to whom they were once allied. Croats and Muslims have been fighting Serbs for control of parts of Bosnia in a bloody civil war that has forced 3 million refugees from their homes.

Jajce, with a population of about 10,000, had been a key Muslim stronghold for strategic and economic reasons.

Meanwhile, Sarajevo suffered its deadliest fighting in weeks Saturday as Muslim and Serb fighters shelled each other on the eve of a “Week of Tranquillity” declared by the U.N. Children’s Fund.

Artillery and mortars killed or wounded scores of people, shattering three weeks of relative calm in the besieged Bosnian capital and stretching hospitals already stretched to the limit.