On the morning of April 16, 1993, the sound of the call to prayer above Ahmici was the signal for HVO soldiers to begin the “48 Hours of Ashes and Smoke” operation and attack the village in which 116 Bosniaks were killed, the youngest victim being a three-month-old baby and the oldest an 82-year-old woman.
On that April 16, 1993, members of the HVO units Džokeri and Maturice attacked Ahmici after the call to prayer for the morning prayer. Among the killed were eleven children and 32 women.
The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia sentenced Dario Kordić to 25 years in prison for crimes committed in Central Bosnia, which also included Ahmici, and Miroslav Brala to 20 years, while Vladimir Šantić was sentenced to 18 and Drago Josipović to 12 years in prison.
The Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina sentenced Paško Ljubičić to 10 years in prison for the crime in Ahmići.
At that time, as a 13-year-old boy, Adnan Zec watched HVO members kill his entire family, and he himself survived the burst from behind. In 2024, he described the crime for Klix.ba.
“At five in the morning, our parents woke us up and told us to get up and go outside. We jumped out of sleep, ran into the hallway, we heard detonations, as if there was an earthquake, shots were fired from all sides. At one point, the house caught fire, but our parents managed to put out the fire, so we went down into the hallway and hid under the stairs. We didn’t know what was happening. At one point, our parents said that we had to leave the house for fear of it catching fire again. We ran out and started walking. after the second to the first Bosniak house in order to find out what is happening,” says Zec.
Fleeing from gunfire, detonations, and whatnot, he lost sight of his parents as he ran toward his neighbor Zijad’s house, where his father and mother were pointing at him.
“I lost sight of my parents at one point, then I saw them again, then they showed me to run towards Zijad’s house. After 50 meters I heard a burst, my neighbor Zahir was killed, and above him was an HVO soldier who asked me, ‘Where are you going, kid?’, I answered that I was running because he was shooting and he waved me off. I walked about 40 meters where there were three other HVO soldiers and they asked me the same thing and told me to go back back,” says Zec and continues:
“As soon as I turned around, a burst was fired at me. Two bullets hit my legs, I didn’t feel them anymore. I fell as if mowed down. The parents were about 15 meters from me, the father begged to kill him, to let the mother and children go, but they ordered three times: “Shoot, kill, kill”. Two bursts and my own were killed.”
For eight days he lay in a house where he managed to crawl and hide. He pointed out that he watched how the identity of Bosniaks and the existence of those who lived there were being killed.
Numerous testimonies remain about the brutality of HVO criminals when committing crimes. Hazim Ahmić lived in the village. At one time, he donated 2,000 m2 of land to his Croatian neighbors for the construction of the Topola Catholic cemetery in Ahmići, and he donated 20,000 marks for the construction of the church in Donja Dubravica.
Hazim Ahmić built a beautiful mosque in Ahmići. The criminals crucified old Hazim on the windows of that mosque, and then they blew up the mosque together with him.
The crime in Ahmići was remembered as one of the most ferocious and well-documented crimes from the aggression against Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the image of the demolished mosque became one of the symbols of the attempt to destroy Bosniaks and their cultural and historical heritage.
