The alleged "weekend snipers" reportedly paid up to €100,000 to participate in the killings during the Bosnian War. Photo / Getty Images
Wealthy foreigners paid tens of thousands of dollars to become “weekend snipers” and shoot civilians during the siege of Sarajevo, according to allegations being investigated by Italian authorities.
An investigation has been launched into claims that gun enthusiasts and far-right extremists travelled to the war-torn city in the 1990s with sniper rifles to pick off terrified Bosnians “for fun”.
The foreigners, from Italy, the United States, Russia and elsewhere, are accused of paying Serbian forces to take part in the shooting spree during the Bosnian War.
They were allegedly motivated by sympathy for the Serbian cause, sheer bloodthirstiness or a combination of the two, investigators say.
Serbia has denied the claims.
But witnesses and Italian investigators claim there was even a price list for the targeted killings – foreigners would pay more to shoot children and men who were armed and in uniform.
The amateur snipers paid the modern-day equivalent of €80,000 to €100,000 ($164,000-$205,000) to take part in the chilling “sport”, according to La Repubblica newspaper.
The Italians are said to have gathered in the northeastern border city of Trieste and were transported to the hills surrounding Sarajevo during the 1992-1996 siege of the city.
The battle, which killed more than 11,500 people, was the longest in modern European history, surpassing the 872-day German siege of Leningrad in World War II.
“War tourists” of various nationalities, including Americans and Russians, were allegedly allowed to shoot at civilians by Bosnian Serb militias under the command of the warlord Radovan Karadzic.
Prosecutors in Milan are trying to identify Italians who were allegedly involved in the killings and could bring charges of “voluntary homicide aggravated by cruelty and abject motives”.
They are being assisted by officers from a specialist unit of the Carabinieri police, known as the Raggruppamento Operativo Speciale, which fights terrorism and organised crime.
Similar claims have been made in the past but have now resurfaced thanks to a formal legal case launched by Benjamina Karic, a former mayor of Sarajevo, “against persons unknown”.
“An entire team of tireless people are fighting to have this complaint heard,” she told Ansa, Italy’s national news agency.
The case has been taken up by an Italian journalist and writer, Ezio Gavazzeni, with the backing of two lawyers and a former judge.
“There was “a price tag for these killings: children cost more, then men, preferably in uniform and armed, women, and finally old people, who could be killed for free,” said Gavazzeni.
Gavazzeni went on to say he was horrified to think that wealthy, middle-class Italians would travel to Bosnia and pay to kill human beings for sport.
“They departed Trieste for a manhunt. And then they came home and continued their normal lives, they were respectable in the opinion of those who knew them,” he said.
Foreigners who travelled to Sarajevo to shoot at civilians had “played God and have remained unpunished”, he told La Repubblica newspaper.
The killings were reportedly carried out with the connivance of Serbian intelligence.
Prosecutors will examine the testimony of a former Bosnian intelligence officer who gathered information about the alleged weekend snipers from a captured Serbian soldier.
The former agent, Edin Subasic, said that during questioning, the Serb soldier said Italians had paid to fire sniper rifles on the front line.
A former US Marine, John Jordan, testified to the United Nations-led ad hoc international criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in 2007 that “tourist shooters” travelled to Sarajevo to take pot shots at civilians for their own gratification.
He said he had seen one foreigner “show up with a weapon that seems more suited to wild boar hunting in the Black Forest than to urban combat in the Balkans” and added that the individual handled the weapon like “a novice”.
The presence of “weekend snipers” was reportedly confirmed at the time by an Italian intelligence agency, SISMI.
Tim Judah, a veteran British expert on the Balkans, said he thought it was possible that foreigners had paid to shoot at the inhabitants of Sarajevo, but the numbers would not have been very great.
“From 1992 to 1995, I spent a lot of time in Pale, which was the HQ for Bosnian Serb forces, and I didn’t hear about it,” he told the Telegraph.
“We didn’t notice strange foreigners turning up. There were some Russians and Greeks, but they were fighting on the Serb side as military volunteers.
“I’m not saying it didn’t happen. It is possible that there were people willing to pay to do this. But I don’t think the numbers would have been very large.”
There is one well-known, documented case of a foreigner shooting at civilians from the hills surrounding Sarajevo.
Eduard Limonov, a Russian nationalist, was filmed in 1992 firing a machine gun down on the besieged city.
He was accompanied by Karadzic, who was later found guilty of genocide and crimes against humanity during the Bosnian war.
Limonov died in Moscow in 2020 at the age of 77.
A controversial documentary called “Sarajevo Safari”, made in 2022 by Miran Zupanic, a Slovenian director, made similar allegations about foreigners embarking on “weekend war safaris”.
One unnamed American former intelligence officer said he saw the tourists paying to shoot at civilians.
“I was in Grbavica [a neighbourhood of Sarajevo] where I saw how, for certain sums of money, strangers would come in to shoot at the surrounded citizens of Sarajevo,” the former intelligence officer said in the film.
Zupanic told Balkan Insight, a news website, that he struggled to believe the claims about the “human safari” when he first heard them.
“My reaction was that something like that was impossible – that hunting people is a fairy tale, an urban legend. It certainly bothers me that there can be people who pay to be allowed to shoot other people. That knowledge is something that is impossible to bear.”
The documentary elicited a furious response from Bosnian Serbs. Veljko Lazic, the head of a veterans’ organisation, called it “an absolute and heinous lie”.
He said the documentary was an “insult to Republika Srpska (the ethnic Serb entity which makes up half of Bosnia-Herzegovina), its Army and the Serb victims of the war”.
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