St. George in Petrićevac. The Bishop of Banja Luka, Platon Jovanović, was arrested by the Ustaše on 5 May 1941 and was tortured and killed and his body was thrown into the river Vrbanja. The city was liberated by the Yugoslav Partisans on 22 April 1945. Banja Luka was the home of many World War II heroes, such as the Vahida brothers and guerilla-fighter Osman Maglajlić. The nursing school in Banja Luka carried their names, but during the Bosnian War the names were changed by the Bosnian Serb authorities.
1969 earthquake
On 26 and 27 October 1969, two devastating earthquakes (6.0 and 6.4 on the Richter scale) damaged many buildings in Banja Luka. 15 people were killed, and over a thousand injuredA large building called Titanik in the centre of the town was razed to the ground, and the area was later turned into a central public square. With contributions from all over Yugoslavia, Banja Luka was repaired and rebuilt. That was a period when a large Serb population moved to the city from the surrounding villages, and from more distant areas in Herzegovina.
Bosnian War
During the 1990s, the city underwent considerable changes when the Bosnian War broke out. Upon the declaration of Bosnian-Herzegovinian independence and the establishment of the Republika Srpska, Banja Luka became the de facto centre of the entity's politics.
The Manjača concentration camp was created on the mountain Manjača, near Banja Luka and was fully operational during the Bosnian War, which lasted from 1992 to 1995. It was founded by the Yugoslav National Army (JNA) and the authorities of the Republika Srpska and was used to confine thousands of male prisoners of Croat and Bosnian Muslim ethnicity. It is estimated that between 4,500 and 6,000 non-Serbs primarily from Sanski Most and Banja Luka passed through the camp. The Manjača camp was shut down under international pressure in late 1993 but was reopened in October 1995. When the camp was captured
