Italy probes claim that tourists paid to go to Bosnia to kill besieged civilians

The Milan prosecutor’s office has opened an investigation into allegations that Italian citizens traveled to Bosnia and Herzegovina on “sniper safaris” during the war in the early 1990s.

Italians and others were allegedly paid large sums to shoot civilians in the besieged city of Sarajevo.

Milan’s complaint was filed by journalist and novelist Ezio Gavazzini, who described a “hunt” by “extremely rich people” with a passion for weapons who “paid money to be able to kill unarmed civilians” from Serb positions in the hills around Sarajevo.

According to some reports, different prices were imposed for the killing of men, women and children.

More than 11,000 people were killed during the brutal four-year siege of Sarajevo.

Yugoslavia was torn apart by war and the city was besieged by Serb forces and subjected to constant bombing and sniper fire.

Similar claims about “human hunters” from abroad have been made several times over the years, but the evidence collected by Gavazzini, which includes the testimony of a Bosnian military intelligence officer, is now being examined by Italian counter-terrorism prosecutor Alessandro Gobis.

The charge is murder.

The Bosnian officer apparently revealed that his Bosnian colleagues discovered the so-called safari in late 1993 and then passed the information to Italian military intelligence Cesme in early 1994.

He said that the response from Cesme came after two months. They discovered that the “safari” tourists would fly in from the northern Italian border city of Trieste and then travel to the hills above Sarajevo.

“We have stopped that and there will be no more safaris,” the Italian news agency ANSA quoted the officer as saying. Within two to three months, the flights stopped.

Ezio Gavazzini, who usually writes about terrorism and the mafia, first read about snipers’ rounds in Sarajevo three decades ago when the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera published the story, but without hard evidence.

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

Gavazzini began to dig further and, in February, handed prosecutors his findings, which were said to amount to a 17-page dossier, including a report by former Sarajevo mayor Benjamina Caric.

The investigation in Bosnia itself appears to have stalled.

Speaking to Italian newspaper La Repubblica, Gavazzini claimed that “many” took part in the practice, “at least a hundred” in all, with the Italians paying “a lot of money” to do it, up to €100,000 (£88,000) at today’s prices.

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

The hill sites were toured by Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, who was later found guilty of genocide by an international court in The Hague.

But Limonov did not pay for war tourism. He was there as an admirer of Karadzic, and told him: “We Russians should take an example from you.”

The fact that Milan prosecutors had opened a case was first reported in July when Il Giornale wrote that the Italians would arrive in the mountains by minibus, paying huge bribes to pass checkpoints as they went, pretending to be on a humanitarian mission.

After the weekend shooting in the war zone, they will return home to their normal lives.

Gavazzini described their actions as “evil indifference.”

Prosecutors and police are said to have identified a list of witnesses as they attempted to identify those involved.