Outside a Morgue ‘Packed to Doors,’ Shrieks of Grief

A trail of blood marked the progress of a stretcher toward the operating rooms of Kosevo Hospital.

The monotonous beep of a life-support machine announced yet another death. Corridors were lined with stretchers of the wounded, the dying and the dead, victims of the shelling Saturday of Sarajevo’s main marketplace.

“The morgue is packed to the doors,” morgue official Hamid Dzindo said. “We are stacking the corpses.” Burials will begin today, he added.

In one corridor of the hospital, 75-year-old Dzanko Pusko lay on a blood-caked stretcher gasping, “Help me, help me!” His legs were severely mangled from the shrapnel that had ripped through the market stalls.

He screamed in pain as nurses hoisted him onto a hospital trolley.

Outside the morgue, cries and shrieks rose from a crowd of hundreds as a hospital official read out names of at least 50 people killed in the attack. The death toll was still rising as night fell. Officials later reported 66 dead.

When the pitiful roll call concluded, some in the crowd wandered off toward adjacent hospital buildings, still hoping for good news.

They were met by horrific scenes.

Emergency room doctors, their white coats splattered with blood, yelled instructions as they rushed to grab gauze, medicines and bandages just delivered by the International Red Cross and other foreign aid groups.

“Where’s the reason behind such mass murder and slaughter of civilians?” asked Ivica Pranjic, a doctor in the emergency room.

At that moment, a NATO warplane monitoring a U.N.-imposed “no-fly” zone over Bosnia swooped low past the hospital. A nurse rushed out of an operating theater.

“What are you doing here?” she screamed at the jet. “Where were you when this happened? Go away!”