Bosnians Recall Vengeful Acts by Retreating Serbs : Cease-fire: Muslims, Croats say rebels looted, raped and murdered as truce, government forces approached.

SANSKI MOST, Bosnia-Herzegovina — The survivors of Banja Luka Street held a bittersweet reunion in a barnyard on the edge of town Saturday, the horror of the past few weeks stalking them like a demon in the night.

Some emerged from hiding places in the nearby woods, others from overgrown nooks in a leafy creek bed. Six had fled from a detention camp run by the Bosnian Serbs, who were in retreat Saturday but still trading mortar and artillery fire with newly arrived Bosnian government forces.

Two Banja Luka Street neighbors lay dead on the curb outside their homes, victims of the bloody battles that raged here all last week but appeared to have eased for the first time Saturday. Two others were found stabbed to death in the schoolyard.

Not far down the road, where Banja Luka Street curves around the ruins of the Sasina village Roman Catholic church, the stench of death was even stronger. Several mounds of dirt, still bearing the fresh tread marks of a bulldozer, were pushed up against the hillside.

“It started at midnight and went until 3 in the morning,” said Janja Egredija, 52, who witnessed one of several nights of terror at the roadside burial site. “I could hear the screaming and the moaning, and then the loud sound of a bulldozer. I almost died--that is how frightened I was.”

At the burial site, the head of a black-haired man still poked through the dry earth. An elbow, a pair of boots and several other clothed body parts pierced the surface of a large, blood-soaked grave.

Bosnia-Herzegovina was in its third day of a cease-fire Saturday, but the Muslim and Croatian residents of this front-line town--which had been under the rule of Bosnian Serb rebels for more than three years--say they are grateful it has had a sputtering start in northwest Bosnia-Herzegovina.

For more than a month, according to two dozen of them reunited here Saturday, existence for Muslims and Croats in Sanski Most was a living hell as Bosnian Serb troops lost their hold on surrounding territory--and sought revenge against local residents.

Sanski Most fell to the combined forces of the Muslim-led government and the Bosnian Croats on Wednesday, just hours before the cease-fire took effect. Fighting around the town persisted into the weekend, including along Banja Luka Street, which stretches from the center of town through outlying villages en route to Banja Luka, the Bosnian Serb stronghold 30 miles away.

“If there were a real cease-fire, we would still not be free, and I tell you, a lot of us wouldn’t even be alive,” said Vlado Buha, 36, whose two brothers, mother and sister-in-law are still unaccounted for. “During the talk of a cease-fire, the Serbs were worse than ever. They came into our house at night, shaved the women’s heads with knives and then held the knives to their throats. They were looting, raping and looking for money.”

Andja Knezic, 48, fled her home in a nightgown Tuesday night when three Serbian soldiers broke down her front door and demanded money. Knezic hid in the woods for three nights. A friend gave her some clothes. She has not been home since.

“When I could only give them 70 marks, one of them threw his knife at me,” she said, peeling potatoes in a large pot of water, a self-described form of therapy. “It stuck in the cupboard behind my head. You can’t imagine how we have suffered.”

The residents of Banja Luka Street traded their horror stories over cups of thick coffee just 50 yards from three 122-millimeter howitzers commanded by Bosnian government soldiers. Repeated cannon fire shook the ground and deafened conversation. At least one low-flying missile, fired in return, whistled overhead and exploded not far down the road.

But residents said the exchanges had eased compared to previous days. Under international pressure, the Bosnian government said Saturday that it had stopped its advance beyond Sanski Most toward the cities of Prijedor and Banja Luka. U.N. and Western officials confirmed that fighting appeared to have subsided.

“Shelling and fighting is reduced a bit along the confrontation line,” a U.N. official in Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital, said Saturday night.

Bosnian Prime Minister Haris Silajdzic said the Serbs “are slowing their attacks down,” allowing the Muslim-led government to do the same. Bosnian Serb army commander Gen. Ratko Mladic was quoted by the Yugoslav news agency Tanjug as saying the offensive beyond Sanski Most had been blocked “with great sacrifice.”

Silajdzic spoke after a meeting with the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. John M. Shalikashvili, who later told reporters that he had cautioned government military officials of the “absolute necessity of restraint.”

“While a cease-fire might not be in place yet, we may be getting closer to it,” Shalikashvili said.

The residents of Banja Luka Street said they are ready for a cease-fire now that government troops have arrived in their terrorized town.

An estimated 6,000 Muslim and Croatian residents were expelled from the Sanski Most area in a last wave of “ethnic cleansing” during the final days of Bosnian Serb control of the town. Witnesses said several thousand men were separated from their families and that their whereabouts remain unknown.

“For three years, we were able to get by, but during the last few weeks all of my contacts on the Serb side couldn’t even help us,” said Mato, a 61-year-old Bosnian Croat who was too afraid to reveal his last name. “Suddenly, if you were not a Serb, you were nobody, you were nothing.”

Mato and 54 other Croatian and Muslim men were rounded up in September and placed in one of several detention centers that local residents and refugee agencies said the Bosnian Serbs established in the town. Mato’s group spent the first few days in a pigsty and then was transferred to a cramped garage at a brick factory not far from Banja Luka Street.

The men worked by day and stood by night. The garage was too small for them to even sit down, Mato and the other detainees said. Some were beaten with shovels and guns, and at least six were taken away and never again returned.

“They gashed my head in three places, and I fell to the ground,” said Tadija Cavlovic, 44, his tired, bloodshot eyes filling with tears as he recounted one attack. “One of them said, ‘Now I am going to kill you.’ I said it would be better than going through this every day.”

The garage where the men were held was still littered with blankets and clothing Saturday, even though they had escaped before last week’s offensive. In the hallway to the garage’s abandoned guardhouse, 22-year-old Ale Osmancevic lay dead in a pool of blood.

His cousin Fadil Sinanovic, 30, a soldier with the Bosnian army’s 5th Corps, came looking for him shortly before dusk. He was taken to the dead man by Edin Aganovic, who was with Osmancevic when he died and brought his body to the guardhouse.

The Muslim men from the nearby village of Kijevo had been forced by Bosnian Serb soldiers to dig trenches along the front line at the Sana River, where the Bosnian government soldiers were advancing Wednesday.

As night fell, the men, along with 25 others, were taken to an auto mechanic shop about 100 yards down the road.

“They put us in the [shop] and closed the doors,” Aganovic said. “Fifteen minutes later, they opened the doors again. They threw in three hand grenades and someone started firing a bazooka gun.

“It was dark, so we had to feel for each other to see who was alive,” Aganovic said. “It was hell. You could feel death everywhere. I wasn’t sure I was even alive.”

Aganovic managed to drag his friend to the brick factory, hoping to find medical care, but Osmancevic died within half an hour. The next day in Austria, where his family had managed to flee a few months ago, his wife gave birth to their third child.

Times staff writer Tracy Wilkinson in Sarajevo contributed to this story.