On this day in 1992, the blockade of Sarajevo began, which lasted 1,425 days, reports the newspaper "Dnevni Avaz". During the siege, 11,541 citizens of Sarajevo died, including 1,601 children, BTA recalls.
On the Sarajevo bridge in Vrbanja, Suada Deliberovic and Olga Suchic were killed by a sniper shot, the first victims of the siege of the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Sarajevo newspaper notes.
The siege of Sarajevo began on April 5, 1992 and ended on February 29, 1996. It lasted 1,425 days or 44 months. During this time, some 350,000 residents of the city were exposed to daily shelling by soldiers of the former Yugoslav Army and paramilitary formations, and later by members of the then Army of Republika Srpska from positions located in the surrounding hills.
The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia sentenced Stanislav Galić, former commander of the Sarajevo-Romanian Corps of the Army of Republika Srpska, to life imprisonment. Galić's successor as head of the Sarajevo-Romanian Corps of the Army of Republika Srpska, Dragomir Milošević, was also sentenced to 29 years in prison.
Former President of Republika Srpska Radovan Karadžić was sentenced to life imprisonment for terrorizing civilians in Sarajevo with sniper and artillery attacks. The commander of the Army of Republika Srpska, General Ratko Mladic, was also sentenced to life imprisonment.