Italian investigations claim tourists paid to go to Bosnia to kill besieged civilians

Milan prosecutors have opened an investigation into allegations that Italian citizens traveled to Bosnia-Herzegovina on “sniper safaris” during the war in the early 1990s.

Italians and others are alleged to have paid large sums of money to shoot civilians in the besieged city of Sarajevo.

The Milan complaint was filed by journalist and novelist Ezio Gavazzeni, who describes a “human persecution” by “very rich people” passionate about weapons who “paid to be able to kill defenseless civilians” from Serbian positions in the hills surrounding Sarajevo.

According to some reports, different fees were charged for killing men, women or children.

More than 11,000 people died during the brutal four-year siege of Sarejevo.

Yugoslavia was devastated by the war and the city was surrounded by Serbian forces and subjected to constant bombing and sniper fire.

Similar accusations about “human hunters” from abroad have been made several times over the years, but the evidence gathered by Gavazzeni, which includes the testimony of a Bosnian military intelligence officer, is now being examined by Italian anti-terrorism prosecutor Alessandro Gobbis.

The charge is murder.

The Bosnian officer apparently revealed that his Bosnian colleagues learned about the so-called safaris in late 1993 and then passed the information on to Italian military intelligence Sismi in early 1994.

Sismi’s response came a couple of months later, he said. They discovered that “safari” tourists were flying from the northern Italian border city of Trieste and then traveling to the hills above Sarajevo.

“We have put an end to this and there will be no more safaris,” the agent was told, according to the Ansa news agency. After two or three months the trips had ceased.

Ezio Gavazzeni, who often writes about terrorism and the mafia, first read about the sniper trips to Sarajevo three decades ago when the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera reported on the story, but without firm evidence.

He returned to the topic after watching “Sarajevo Safari,” a 2022 documentary by Slovenian director Miran Zupanic that alleges that those involved in the killings came from several countries, including the United States, Russia and Italy.

Gavazzeni began investigating further and in February handed prosecutors his findings, which are said to amount to a 17-page dossier that includes a report by former Sarajevo mayor Benjamina Karic.

An investigation in Bosnia itself appears to have stalled.

Speaking to Italian newspaper La Repubblica, Gavazzeni alleges that “many” participated in the practice, “at least a hundred” in total, and that Italians paid “a lot of money” to do it, up to €100,000 (£88,000) in today’s terms.

In 1992, the late Russian nationalist writer and politician Eduard Limonov was filmed firing multiple shots into Sarajevo with a heavy machine gun.

Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, who was later convicted of genocide by an international tribunal in The Hague, was giving him a tour of the hillside positions.

But Limonov did not pay for his war tour. He was there as an admirer of Karadzic and told him: “We Russians should follow your example.”

Italian prosecutors and police are said to have identified a list of witnesses as they try to establish who might have been involved.

However, members of the British forces who served in Sarajevo in the 1990s told the BBC they had never heard of so-called “sniper tourism” during the Bosnian conflict.

They indicated that any attempt to bring in people from third countries who had paid to shoot civilians in Sarajevo would have been “logistically difficult to achieve”, due to the proliferation of checkpoints.

British forces served both within Sarajevo and in areas surrounding the city, where Serbian forces were stationed, and saw nothing at the time to suggest that “sniper tourism” was taking place.

One soldier described accusations that foreigners had paid to shoot civilians as an “urban myth.”