Mortar Fire Kills 6 Children Playing in Sarajevo’s Snow

Mortar fire killed six children as they played in the snow near their apartment building in Sarajevo on Saturday, hospital officials and eyewitnesses said. Three were seriously injured.

Scores of children had been frolicking in the area, lured outside by a lull in the shooting on a fine winter day, but the sled run in the Alipasno Polje district was virtually deserted after the attack.

“My friends and I were sliding on ice in front of our apartment building when a mortar fell and we started running for the entrance,” gasped Muhamed Kapetanovic as he lay on a stretcher waiting for emergency treatment.

“We tried to run inside but then another shell landed between me and my friend. He was killed and I was wounded in four places,” Muhamed said, his anguished father hovering nearby.

Later, elderly neighbors shoveled away blood-soaked snow and slush.

Doctors at the Kosevo Hospital trauma ward said the children ranged in age from 4 to 12 and that two of the dead were sisters.

A mortar barrage on a school in the same neighborhood last November killed three children and a teacher.

The Serbian siege of Sarajevo has killed about 9,770 people, 1,550 of them children. Nearly 58,000 have been wounded.

Bosnian Prime Minister Haris Silajdzic said the shelling only a few hundred yards from U.N. peacekeeping force headquarters in a city designated a U.N. “safe area” was another Serbian snubbing of the outside world.

In a letter to U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, the Muslim-led Bosnian government called again for air strikes to knock out artillery of Serbian forces that have shelled the capital for 21 months.

A spokesman for the U.N. peacekeeping force in Sarajevo said U.N. observers would analyze the mortar craters as soon as possible to determine where the shells had been fired from.

Nationalist Serbian forces typically deny responsibility for civilian deaths in Sarajevo.

At Kosevo Hospital, neighbors carried one shellshocked boy on his sled into the trauma ward for treatment of a mangled leg.

In the nearby morgue, the slain children lay on stretchers. One had a single mitten between his legs and a snow boot to the side.

A young father gazed at the decapitated body of his daughter. He could not speak.