Sick British tourists on human safaris ‘paid extra to shoot pregnant women and kids’ | History | News

Disturbing reports have been surfacing for years about ‘Sarajevo safaris’, in which wealthy foreigners allegedly paid thousands to kill civilians as a blood sport during the deadly siege of Sarajevo.

Wealthy visitors from Britain, Italy, Germany, Russia and the US are alleged to have paid up to £88,000 to use Bosnian Serb sniper positions above the besieged city to kill people for fun, plus paying extra to target children or pregnant women.

At night, they reportedly gorged themselves on roast pork and lamb, ditching whiskey and brandy as they celebrated their murders. Aleksandar Licanin, a former volunteer with a Bosnian Serb tank unit, said he witnessed the foreign shooters firsthand.

“All the snipers were pure sadists,” he said.

Licanin said that after the murders that occurred every day, rich foreigners went to cafes to feast.

“We would go, we didn’t want to contact them,” he said Times. “They were celebrating killing people. I can’t imagine how you can live with killing a child.”

This allegedly occurred during the siege of Sarajevo, which lasted nearly four years from April 1992 to February 1996, making it the longest blockade of a capital city in modern warfare. More than 10,000 people were killed during 1,425 bloody days.

After Italian authorities began investigating allegations that Italian hunters were among those involved in foreign killing holidays, Licanin said he felt he could come forward.

He said his involvement in the war began in 1993, when the Bosnian Serb community separated from Muslim Bosnians due to rising ethnic and religious tensions. He moved to the Serb-controlled area of ​​Sarajevo, where he joined a Bosnian Serb tank unit.

He said his unit shared a vantage point above the city with a 200-strong Serbian militia led by former postal worker Slavko Aleksic.

“They were shooting at women, children and the elderly. They were out of control and it was obvious from their eyes that Aleksic was a psychopath.”

While Licanin said his unit had received official targeting coordinates, he claimed that Aleksic’s snipers chose their victims.

While visitors reportedly paid for better visibility in high-rise buildings, Croatian investigative journalist Domagoj Margetic claimed he was told that sick shooters would “pay more to shoot children and pregnant women.”

Margetic said militia contacts told him the attackers came from Russia, Romania, Greece, Italy, Spain, France, Germany, the United States, Canada and England.

The claim that there were women among the bloodsport tourists was supported by the then Sarajevo police chief, Zlatko Miletic, who led the anti-sniper team.

“I remember a Romanian woman who must have killed more than ten people,” he told Balkan news channel N1 this month.

“These foreign snipers were dug deep into concrete trenches and it was difficult to neutralize them,” said Miletic, who is now a member of parliament in Bosnia.

“They killed dozens of children and women,” he said, adding: “We had information that [the Aleksic militia] “I was hosting these people for money, and most of them were from Italy.”

Allegations of foreign murder have been vehemently denied. Aleksic died in December, but just before his death he denied harboring foreign snipers.