SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina (AP) - Javor Povric raised his rifle, squeezed the trigger and held his breath.
"I now have three seconds to fire, or else I have to re-aim and start all over again," said the Bosnian Defense Forces sniper, lowering his gun without firing as he demonstrated his technique."The first time I targeted a human being about six weeks ago, I started trembling," added Povric, 39, a computer operator who in his youth was a Yugoslav rifle-shooting champion. "It's no different now."
A soft-spoken pacifist before the war, Povric says he volunteered to join his special unit after Serbian snipers fired on a crowd demonstrating for peace in front of Sarajevo's now-ravaged Holiday Inn April 6.
He sneered at marksmen who target innocent civilians: "They are animals . . . it's easy to pull a trigger from a safe place."
Povric's job is to track down Serbian snipers and shoot them before they shoot others.
"Snajperisti" is a word spoken daily with dread by locals since war erupted in Sarajevo almost three months ago. It means snipers, which doctors cite as the main cause of death here, after shrapnel.
Both sides use snipers, although city residents generally agree the Serbs used them first.
When the fighting began, snipers were generally thought of as men with guns standing behind curtains and taking potshots at passers-by. They scared enough people to keep them at home most of the day.
As the war escalated, better guns and high-tech sights made sharpshooting even sharper. Corpses downed by the lone gunmen are an all-too-common sight: drivers hanging out of smashed cars, shoppers lying in gutters, their precious food spewing out of scattered bags.
Viewers were horrified last month when Bosnian TV showed graphic footage of a man being hit in the shoulder by snipers as he dragged himself away from a burned-out truck hit by an anti-aircraft rocket. He was trailing an already bloody and mangled leg.
Another man, whose toddler daughter was killed by a sniper, appeared on TV saying he did not want revenge but "I want to sit down and drink coffee with the man and ask why he did it."
"Their aim is to make this city unsafe to work, walk and live in," said Povric. "They're trying to kill the city by terror."
He lowered his specially made semi-automatic weapon, based on the Yugoslav-made 7.9 mm M-76 but topped with a powerful hunting scope. The gun was seized from Yugoslav Army snipers last month.