SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina -- A Serbian artillery round exploded Friday above a crowd waiting to fill water containers near Sarajevo's brewery, killing at least eight people, injuring 15 others and leaving the street running with blood, police and witnesses said.
The death toll was expected to rise.
The tragedy occurred during daylong shelling and sniper fire into the Muslim Slav-dominated Bosnian capital by besieging Serbian forces fighting to rip a self-declared state out of the former Yugoslav republic.
The violence did not prevent an evacuation of some 400 elderly and sick residents from the city in a convoy arranged by the municipal government.
Police and witnesses said some 300 people were waiting behind the city brewery to fill containers from a natural spring amid a more than month-long disruption of the municipal water system. The spring feeds the brewery.
A Serbian artillery shell blasted at about 1:45 p.m. into a wall about five yards above the crowd, releasing a storm of shrapnel, police said.
At least seven people were killed and 15 others injured, said police. They noted that the toll could have been much higher as the number of people who wait for water at the location sometimes reaches more than 1, 000.
An hour after the attack, the street behind the brewery still ran with blood, and abandoned water containers lay strewn around the site.
'We fell down like grass or corn being scythed,' said Kasim Sakikaj, 48, whose 12-year-old daughter Afrodita was killed in the attack. 'There were taps flowing, mixing water with the blood.'
Salim Hadzibajric, the president of the local council of the Bistric neighborhood, where the brewery is located, blamed the city and Bosnian governments, as well as the U.N. Protection Force, or UNPROFOR, for the tragedy because they have failed to reconnect the municipal water system.
That, he asserted, has forced thousands of citizens to congregate at water distribution points every day despite heavy shelling by surrounding Serbian artillery, mortars and tanks.
'We were waiting for something like this to happen,' Hadzibajric said, adding that water distribution at the brewery would be suspended.
With most males of military age serving in the Bosnian army, the vast majority of people who usually wait to collect water at distribution points are women and the elderly.
It was the third incident of its kind of the war. On May 27, 18 people were killed in a Serbian mortar attack on a bread line. On June 22, at least people died and 55 were injured when Serbian artillery shells exploded near a queue of residents waiting to fill water containers from a tanker truck.
The evacuation of the roughly 400 sick and elderly began in the afternoon with buses bound for the border between Bosnia-Herzegovina and the Adriatic coastal region of Croatia.
The operation was arranged on short notice by the Sarajevo municipal government. Some of the evacuees included mentally handicapped and blind people.
Another estimated 120 evacuees bound for Belgrade, the capital of Serbia and the rump Yugoslav federation, also hoped to leave. But, they were still waiting in the late afternoon at the downtown assembly point for transportation to a Serb-held former Yugoslav army garrison in the western suburb of Lukavica.
The operation was expected to be suspended until Saturday since UNPROFOR, which controls Sarajevo airport, does not allow traffic to cross the airstrip to Lukavica after nightfall.
Sarajevo radio reported Friday evening that more than 300 people, including more than 200 children, have died of hunger and exposure this week in Cerska, near the isolated Muslim enclave of Zepa, the destination of a Ukrainian-escorted aid convoy.
Cerska, which has so far received no humanitarian aid, has no road link with Zepa and will not benefit even if the U.N. convoy were to reach its destination by Saturday. The convoy has been forced to take a circuitous route to Zepa through Serb-held territory.
Fighting, meanwhile, was reported across the former Yugoslav republic of 1.9 million Muslim Slavs, 1.4 million Christian Orthodox Serbs and 750,000 Roman Catholic Croats.
The battles included clashes around Gornji Vakuf, 35 miles east of Sarajevo, between normally allied Muslim Slav-led Bosnian government forces and a Croatian militia, Sarajevo radio said.
The fighting around the Bosnian government-controlled town came despite a cease-fire reached on Thursday night following several days of clashes.
On the diplomatic front, mediators Cyrus Vance and Lord David Owen held talks on their peace plan in the Croatian capital of Zagreb with Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic, his foreign minister, Haris Silajdzic, Bosnian Croat leader Mate Boban and his chief patron, rightwing President Franjo Tudjman of Croatia.
The pair pursued negotiations on the plan despite a suspension in the Geneva-based peace conference they co-chair that was forced on Tuesday by a rejection of the proposal by Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic.
Hours after the suspenion, Karadzic announced that he would accept the plan if approved by the self-styled parliament of his unrecognized Serbian 'state' during a meeting expected to be held on Tuesday in the Serb-held town of Pale, east of Sarajevo.
Karadzic had opposed the Vance-Owen plan because it excludes acceptance of his 'state.' Instead, it would maintain Bosnia- Herzegovina's integrity, while dividing it into 10 largely autonomous provinces linked by a weak central government.
