Topalović, nicknamed "Caco", was a pre-war rock musician and gangster who became commander of the Sarajevo-based unit at the outset of the war. He was also involved in the organization of the Patriotic League and Green Berets paramilitaries. Topalović, along with Jusuf Prazina, Ismet Bajramović and others, was one of the key criminals tasked with defending the city during the early stages of the war. Ramiz Delalić, who commanded the 9th Mountain Brigade in Sarajevo, and Topalović who commanded the 10th brigade, controlled a large part of the besieged capital. Topalović controlled the area from Skenderija on the left bank of the Miljacka eastward. He exercised absolute power over neighborhoods, press-ganged recruits, ran black market smuggling, kidnapped and ransomed rich people, organized rapes, allocated empty houses, and executed Serb fighters and civilians. In one documented case, a family of six was gunned down by automatic weapons as they gathered to eat lunch, by assailants who were wearing uniforms of the Patriotic League. Jovan Divjak, a Serbian general serving with the Sarajevo government, said that officials identified the killers within hours but police blocked the investigation – as in many other cases of Anti-Serb violence. The Kazani pit was located on Mount Trebević below Bosnian Serb Army positions and approximately 1.5 kilometers north of the city center. It was used by Caco and his men as a place for murder and as a mass grave for their victims. Serb civilians were rounded up, beaten and then killed, often by having their throats slit and being decapitated, before their bodies were dumped at the Kazani pit. On May 27, 1993, Divjak informed then president of the federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Alija Izetbegović of the crimes carried out against Serbian civilians in Sarajevo. He sent a five-page letter which not only detailed the killings being carried out by paramilitary groups, but also listed more than a dozen names of those who had been abducted and slain.
Arrests
On October 26, 1993, Muslim police units disbanded Caco's paramilitary group, arrested 16 soldiers and killed Caco, who one Muslim general described as "an inconvenient witness" to wartime atrocities. 14 soldiers were convicted of various atrocities, with most serving sentences of a few months. Esad Tucakovic, who was sentenced to six years in prison for his role in killings carried out in October 1993, described the torture and murder of Vasilij and Ana Lavriv, a couple during his trial. After describing how he hit Vasilij Lavriv and killed him by slitting his throat, he continued: The Bosnian government's relationship with Caco and his paramilitary group proved to be complicated as their defense of the city during its siege was a priority. Alibabić and others charge that Caco was eliminated not because he was an out-of-control commander but because he had become a political liability for Izetbegović and his inner circle of SDA political leaders who were accomplices in his dirty work.
Death toll
An exhumation of the mass graves at the Kazani pit was undertaken by investigators, with 29 bodies being recovered after a few days. However, the work was abruptly halted by the Interior Ministry and never resumed. "There were clearly more than 29 bodies in the pit," said Munir Alibabić, who at the time was the police chief of Sarajevo and was in charge of the investigation, "but I was ordered to stop all work. When I questioned the Minister of Interior, he told me this was a presidential order. I suspect that finding large numbers of bodies was politically inconvenient." Of the 15 victims that were identified, 10 were Serbs, 2 Ukrainians, 2 Croats and one Bosniak. The total number of victims killed at Kazani is not known, with estimates ranging from a few dozen to some hundreds. Victims estimates of Serb civilians killed in Bosnian government-held Sarajevo conducted by the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina officials say "at least 150". The actions of paramilitary units led many thousands of Serbs to flee the city, particularly in the summer of 1992. By war's end, the number of Serbs in Sarajevo was estimated to be in the low tens of thousands, fewer than 20% of those who had lived in the city in 1991.
Commemoration
In 2016, Bosnian Muslim politician Bakir Izetbegović, the son of Alija Izetbegović, paid tribute to Sarajevo Serb war victims by visiting the Kazani pit and laying flowers at the edge of the ravine.
