
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: THURSDAY, February 10, 1994                   TAG: 9402100019
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-14   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: VIENNA, AUSTRIA                                LENGTH: Medium

EXPERTS CAN'T PROVE WHOSE SHELL KILLED 68 IN SARAJEVO

Although Serb gunners are thought to have fired the mortar round that killed 68 Sarajevo shoppers and brought NATO to the brink of intervening in Bosnia's civil war, just who is to blame may never be known.

The shell hit a stall as it fell on the open market, causing the shell to explode at chest height with tremendous power. The deflection prevented U.N. observers from determining who fired it, they said.

But the shell's incredible carnage - 68 dead and 142 wounded - and the inability to prove who fired it have yielded endless speculation.

Newspapers in Belgrade, the Serbian and Yugoslav capital, have been filled with "expert" analyses seeking to disprove that a single shell could have killed so many.

Instead, they have presented hypotheses suggesting various reasons for Bosnian government troops to kill their own people.

One theory, attributed to "Bosnian Serb sources," blamed a cabal of foreign Muslims. Another has Yugoslav Army Col. Milan Rundic claiming someone took a time bomb to the market in a sack.

Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, in a letter to President Clinton and Russian President Boris Yeltsin, claimed the massacre was "a big and inept deception" and that "among the bodies there were plastic and textile dolls."

Some of the wild theories in circulation can be attributed to how unusual it is for a single mortar round - 2 1/2 pounds of TNT wrapped in an iron sleeve - to cause so much death and maiming.

But Terry Gander, editor of Jane's Ammunition Handbook in London, said he was "not in the least bit surprised."

Because the bomb exploded after hitting a market stall, it unleashed all its force on the crowd. Normally, some of the shrapnel and force would be lost in the ground.

U.N. officials normally inspect a crater hole to determine the angle of firing, enabling them to trace the shell's trajectory back to mortar positions around the city. But the deflection made that impossible, said Gen. Michael Rose, the U.N. commander in Sarajevo.

U.N. officials have not indicated plans for further investigation of who fired the shell. Such a quest would be fruitless, Gander said.

The 120 mm mortars used in Bosnia are Yugoslav-made and are fired by all sides, he said.

Keywords:
FATALITY

by CNB