Italy probes claims that tourists paid to shoot at civilians in Bosnian war

The Milan prosecutor’s office launched an investigation into allegations that Italian citizens went to Bosnia for “sniper safaris” during the war in the early 1990s.

Italians and others allegedly paid large sums of money to shoot at civilians who risked their lives to cross the city’s main boulevard.

Milan’s complaint was filed by journalist and novelist Ezio Gavazzeni, who described a “manhunt” carried out by “very rich people” with arms enthusiasts who “paid to kill defenseless civilians” from Serb positions in the hills around Sarajevo.

According to some reports, different rates of punishment were imposed for the murder of men, women and children.

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

Yugoslavia was torn apart by war and the city was surrounded by Serbian forces and subjected to constant shelling and sniper fire.

Similar allegations about “man hunters” from abroad have been made many times over the years, but the evidence Gavazzeni collected, including the testimony of a Bosnian military intelligence officer, is now being examined by Italian counter-terrorism prosecutor Alessandro Gobbis.

The charge is murder.

The Bosnian officer apparently explained that his Bosnian colleagues became aware of the alleged safaris in late 1993 and then passed this information to Italy’s Sismi military intelligence in early 1994.

A few months later, Sismi responded. They learned that the “Safari” tourists would fly from the northern Italian border city of Trieste and then travel to the hills above Sarajevo.

“We have put an end to this and there will be no more safaris,” the officer said. Within two to three months the trips stopped.

Ezio Gavazzeni, who often writes about terrorism and the mafia, first read about sniper tours of Sarajevo three decades ago when the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera reported it, but there was no definitive evidence.

He returned to the subject after watching Slovenian director Miran Zupanic’s 2022 documentary film “Sarajevo Safari.” In this film, it is claimed that those involved in the murders came from many countries, including the USA, Russia and Italy.

Gavazzeni began to dig deeper and presented his findings to prosecutors in February, said to be a 17-page dossier that included a report by former Sarajevo mayor Benjamina Karic.

The investigation in Bosnia also appears to have stalled.

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

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

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

However, Limonov did not cover the costs of war tourism. He was there as a Karadzic fan and told the so-called Butcher of Bosnia: “We Russians should take an example from you.”

The fact that Milan prosecutors had opened a case was first reported in July, when the website Il Giornale wrote that the Italians would arrive in the mountains by minivan, pay huge bribes to pass through checkpoints on the way, and pretend to be on a humanitarian mission.

After a weekend of fighting in the war zone, they would return home to their normal lives.

Gavazzeni described his actions as “the indifference of evil”.

Prosecutors and police are said to have identified a list of witnesses as they try to determine who may have been involved.