Markale massacres, more than 60 people are killed and some 200 wounded as a mortar shell explodes in a downtown marketplace in Sarajevo.
The Markale market shelling or Markale massacres were two separate bombardments, with at least one of them confirmed to have been carried out by the Army of Republika Srpska, targeting civilians during the siege of Sarajevo in the Bosnian War. They occurred at the Markale (marketplace) located in the historic core of Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
The first occurred on 5 February 1994; 68 people were killed and 144 more were wounded by a 120-millimetre (4.7 in) mortar. The second occurred on 28 August 1995 when five mortar shells launched by Army of Republika Srpska killed 43 people and wounded 75 others. The latter attack was the alleged reason for NATO air strikes against Bosnian Serb forces that would eventually lead to the Dayton Peace Accords and the end of the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
The responsibility of the Army of the Republika Srpska for the first shelling is contested, since investigations to establish the location from where the shells had been fired led to ambiguous results. It was claimed that the Bosnian army had actually shelled its own people in order to provoke intervention of Western countries on their side. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in its appeal judgement of Stanislav Galić in 2006 summarized the evidence and ruled that the conclusion that the shells had been fired from a location occupied by Serb forces was a reasonable one; nevertheless, Radovan Karadžić during his trial before ICTY tried to use this claim to his defence, but was found guilty.