66 Die as Shell Rips Through Bosnia Market : Sarajevo: Two hundred are injured as chaos replaces routine in the worst assault on the capital since the fighting began. Clinton says he is ‘outraged’ by the ‘cowardly act.’

A single, large-caliber shell slammed into an open-air marketplace in Sarajevo on Saturday, killing at least 66 people and injuring more than 200 in the worst attack on the Bosnian capital since the country’s civil war began.

The 120-millimeter mortar was fired from northeast of the marketplace just after noon as people took advantage of fair weather to stock up on provisions.

In seconds, chaos replaced routine. Victims were laid out on tables that had once held the meager goods offered for sale. Blood spattered the concrete. The dead were lined up along a wall.

“It is a little difficult to identify the victims and the number of killed, because a lot of them are in pieces,” morgue worker Alija Hodzic told the Associated Press.

U.N. officials were unable to pin blame for the attack on any of Bosnia’s warring parties. They said that U.N. troops are analyzing the crater to determine the shell’s origin.

A spokesman from Bosnia’s Muslim government said the shell was fired from a Serb-held position. Serbian leaders denied the charge and even suggested that government soldiers had fired on their own people as a way of persuading the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to go ahead with threatened air strikes on Serbian positions.

In Washington, President Clinton said he was “outraged” by the “cowardly act” and called on the Pentagon to dispatch U.S. aircraft to Sarajevo to help evacuate victims. Clinton repeated a U.S. promise to support NATO air strikes, although he gave no indication that such a move was imminent. And he urged the United Nations to “urgently investigate” who was to blame.

U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali repeated that call, and his special representative to the Balkans, Yasushi Akashi, planned to go to Sarajevo today.

Akashi reportedly will try to use the macabre incident to help persuade the warring factions to make more strident efforts at the bargaining table. Bosnian peace talks had been set to resume Thursday in Geneva.

“I express my outrage and that of the whole international community at this unspeakable act of barbarity,” Akashi said in a statement. “We shall be carrying some specific proposals to the parties for concrete action to reduce the tensions.”

The marketplace, partially enclosed by buildings at least three stories high, had been considered relatively safe from much of the shelling that has besieged the capital for 22 months.

Minutes after the shell struck, the air was filled with the voices of wailing survivors and the howl of ambulance sirens. Rescue workers commandeered the green canvases that had covered the market stalls to ferry away the dead and wounded. Other bodies were loaded onto open trucks and vans because there were not enough ambulances and morgue vehicles.

Graphic television footage showed rescue workers scrambling to take survivors to Sarajevo’s Kosevo Hospital. One survivor shouted: “Thank you, Boutros-Ghali! Thank you, Clinton!”

Many in Bosnia-Herzegovina have become increasingly frustrated with the United Nations and the United States for their inability to prevent further bloodshed.

Munever Bavtic, who was shopping on the square when the blast occurred, told the Associated Press: “This was done by the world, not by the Chetniks (Serbian forces). You must send greetings to all those politicians out there sitting in their armchairs--it wasn’t their kids who were killed today.”

Bosnian Prime Minister Haris Silajdzic echoed the woman’s remarks. In an interview on CNN late Saturday, Silajdzic warned the international community that the horrific scenes they were watching were “coming to your doorsteps.”

He placed blame for the attack on the international community and the U.N. Security Council, which has refused to lift an arms embargo that has kept Muslim forces from securing arms to protect themselves.

Gen. Manojlo Milovanovic, the Bosnian Serb army chief of staff, demanded from Lt. Gen. Michael Rose, the U.N. commander in Bosnia, that Serbs be included on a commission to investigate the latest massacre. Otherwise, he warned, Serbian forces would sever all cooperation with the U.N. force and all humanitarian organizations as of Monday. There was no immediate U.N. reaction.

Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic suggested that Muslim government soldiers fired the deadly shell as a means of forcing the international community to retaliate against the Serbs. That charge was immediately dismissed by the Bosnian government.

NATO allies have threatened to use their air power in the Bosnian war, but only with U.N. Security Council approval. Boutros-Ghali has been reluctant to back allied air strikes without reinforcement of ground forces. In addition, Clinton Administration officials have characterized previous attacks on Sarajevo as either below the threshold for allied response or as a justified retaliation for Bosnian Muslim ground assaults.

Saturday’s attack came just a day after 10 people were killed and 18 wounded in shelling of the Sarajevo suburb of Dobrinja.