By Remix News Staff

Italian prosecutors have launched an investigation into allegations that Italians traveled to Sarajevo on weekend “sniper safaris” to shoot at residents of the city during the 1992-1995 siege by the Bosnian Serb army, in which more than 11,000 people died.

The alleged “safaris” took place while Bosnian Serb forces were besieging the city, which became the longest siege in modern European history, Al Jazeera reports.

The Milan investigation, led by prosecutor Alessandro Gobbis, was launched after journalist and novelist Ezio Gavazzeni, working with lawyers Nicola Brigida and former judge Guido Salvini, filed a legal complaint for “murders aggravated by cruelty and vile motives” regarding the alleged Italian groups who traveled to Sarajevo.

Italian media reports say investigators are hoping to track down the people who took part in the alleged “safaris,” in addition to the five men already identified in Gacazzeni’s trial.

Gavazzeni, who has handed over all his evidence to prosecutors, told Italian news outlet La Repubblica on Tuesday that his lawsuit “exposes a part of society that is sweeping the truth under the carpet.”

“Because we are talking about reputable, wealthy people, entrepreneurs, who paid to kill defenseless civilians during the siege of Sarajevo,” he added.

It should be noted that the BBC, in the same report where it broke the story, already cast some doubts on the allegations.

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

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

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

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

What is known so far

Between 1992 and 1996, Italian citizens and others, mainly gun enthusiasts, gathered on Fridays in Trieste, in northwestern Italy, in the area bordering the former Yugoslavia, for a weekend of “hunting.” It remains unclear who organized the alleged groups’ trips.

The participants were allegedly flown by the Yugoslav/Serbian airline Aviogenex to the hills surrounding Sarajevo, where Bosnian Serb militias were paid to shoot at citizens by President Radovan Karadžić – who was later convicted of genocide and crimes against humanity for war crimes committed in the former Yugoslavia in 2016 and sentenced to life in prison after an appeal in 2019.

According to La Repubblica, these “tourists” paid up to $116,000 to join the Sarajevo gangs to commit the murders.

Gavazzeni claims that participants were given a price list of what types of murders the foreigners they wanted to target would pay for. Children would cost the most, followed by men, women and the elderly, who could be killed for free.

“A participant left Trieste to hunt for people. Then he returned and continued his normal life, in a manner that was respectable in the eyes of everyone,” Gavazzeni said.

Gavazzeni’s 17-page submission includes the testimony of Edin Subasic, a Bosnian military intelligence officer, who claims that he and some of his colleagues informed the Italian military intelligence agency, Sismi, about reports of Italians flying from Trieste to Sarajevo in early 1994. In his testimony, he claimed that the Italian intelligence service told him a few months later that it had stopped the flights.

According to the Sismi report, the departure points in Trieste were discovered and the routes were interrupted.

Another witness cited in the petition gave Gavazzeni the details of three men currently under investigation, from Turin, Milan and Trieste. According to the Sismi report cited in the lawsuit, the Milanese man who took part in the 1993 shootings was the owner of a private plastic surgery clinic.

Benjamina Karic, the former mayor of Sarajevo, also filed a case file with the Milan prosecutor’s office about these “rich foreigners who carried out inhumane activities,” the Italian news agency ANSA reported.

Serbia has denied any involvement in the killings, but investigators believe Serbian intelligence services were aware of them.

Dag Dumrukcic, Bosnia’s consul in Milan, told La Repubblica on Tuesday that his government was “fully cooperating with the investigation.”

“We look forward to uncovering the truth in this cruel case and putting the past behind us. I have information that I will pass on to investigators,” said Dumruckic.

It is suspected that citizens of several countries participated in the attacks. In 2022, Bosnian filmmaker Miran Zupanic’s documentary Sarajevo Safari examined wealthy foreigners who participated in these trips, including some from the United States and Russia.

A notable example was Russian nationalist writer and politician Eduard Limonov, who was filmed in Pawel Pawlikowski’s 1992 documentary about the Bosnian War firing a machine gun towards the city of Sarajevo while personally escorted by Karadžić.

Moreover, in 2007, former U.S. Marine John Jordan testified before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia that “tourist shooters” had arrived in Sarajevo.