Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic has called the accusation that he was involved in “sniper tourism” during the siege of Sarajevo a “lie.”
This follows a complaint filed with Italian prosecutors by a Croatian journalist, who claimed that a video from the 1990s and subsequent testimony by Bosnian officials showed that Vucic was a “war volunteer” with Bosnian Serb forces in positions overlooking Sarajevo.
At a UK-Western Balkans business conference in Belgrade, Vucic said he had “never killed anyone, injured anyone or done anything like that.”
He added that he had “never held a sniper rifle in my life.”
Images that supposedly show him with such a weapon actually show him carrying a “camera tripod,” he said.
He said the Croatian journalist was trying to “present me as a monster, as inhuman, as someone who not only has no emotions, but is a cold-blooded killer.”
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.
Italian prosecutors opened an investigation earlier this month into allegations that wealthy foreigners had paid to shoot civilians during the siege of Sarajevo.
This followed a complaint from an Italian writer who had seen the 2022 Slovenian documentary, Sarajevo Safari, which was the source of the accusations.
Writer Ezio Gavazzeni claims that Italians and others paid large sums of money to go on “sniper safaris” and shoot civilians in the besieged city of Sarajevo during the war in the early 1990s.
Claims by Croatian journalist Domagoj Margetic that Vucic had volunteered for a Bosnian Serb militia at a location above Sarajevo had also previously been strongly denied by Vucic’s spokeswoman Suzana Vasiljevic.
He said in comments published in the Times newspaper that the accusations were “a classic case of malicious disinformation, designed specifically to erode the institutional credibility of the Republic of Serbia and its president. This narrative lacks factual basis and is operationally designed to generate reputational damage.”
At the time, Vucic was working as a journalist and translator in nearby Pale, “without any contact with military structures or operational activities,” she said.
He added: “President Vucic did not participate in combat activities, did not use weapons and had no role in any wartime operations.”
Similar accusations about “human hunters” from abroad have been made several times over the years.
However, the chief prosecutor of the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals in The Hague told the BBC that his organization has no information about the allegations.
Bosnia’s war crimes prosecutor received a complaint in 2022, but has not issued any indictments.
UK special forces troops who served in Sarajevo during the siege told the BBC the allegations are an “urban myth”.
