Sarajevo wedding attack

Around 2:30 p.m. on Sunday, 1 March 1992, a Serb wedding procession in Sarajevo's old Muslim quarter of Baščaršija was attacked, resulting in the death of the father of the groom, Nikola Gardović, and the wounding of a Serbian Orthodox priest. The attack took place on the last day of a controversial referendum on Bosnia and Herzegovina's independence from Yugoslavia, in the early stages of the breakup of Yugoslavia and the Yugoslav Wars.

In response to the shooting, Serb Democratic Party (SDS) irregulars set up barricades and roadblocks across Sarajevo, accusing the Bosnian Muslim Party of Democratic Action (SDA) of orchestrating the attack. The SDS demanded that Serb-inhabited areas of Bosnia and Herzegovina be patrolled by Serbs, and not by police officers of other ethnicities, and further called for United Nations peacekeepers to be deployed to the country. On 3 March, the SDS agreed to dismantle the barricades it had erected. The Muslim-dominated People's Assembly of Bosnia and Herzegovina declared the country's independence the same day.

Gardović is often regarded as the first casualty of the Bosnian War. Ramiz Delalić, a career criminal allegedly under the protection of the SDA, was quickly identified as a suspect, but the Bosnian Muslim authorities made little effort to locate him in the immediate aftermath of the shooting. During the war, Delalić led a militia that persecuted Sarajevo's Serb population. He later admitted to carrying out the attack in a televised interview. In 2004, Delalić was charged with one count of first-degree murder in relation to Gardović's death, but was shot and killed in 2007, before his trial could be completed. In the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the country's semi-autonomous Bosniak–Croat entity, 1 March is celebrated as Independence Day. The holiday is not observed in the semi-autonomous Bosnian Serb entity Republika Srpska and most Bosnian Serbs associate the date with the wedding attack rather than with the independence referendum. The shooting was dramatized in the 1998 British war film Welcome to Sarajevo.