The public prosecutor’s office in Milan has opened an investigation into claims that Italian citizens travelled to Bosnia-Herzegovina on “sniper safaris” during the war in the early 1990s.
Italians and others are alleged to have paid large sums to shoot at civilians in the besieged city of Sarajevo.
The Milan complaint was filed by journalist and novelist Ezio Gavazzeni, who describes a “manhunt” by “very wealthy people” with a passion for weapons who “paid to be able to kill defenceless civilians” from Serb positions in the hills around Sarajevo.
Different rates were charged to kill men, women or children, according to some reports.
More than 11,000 people died during the brutal four-year siege of Sarejevo.
Yugoslavia was torn apart by war and the city was surrounded by Serb forces and subjected to constant shelling and sniper fire.
Similar allegations about “human hunters” from abroad have been made several times over the years, but the evidence gathered by Gavazzeni, which includes 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 revealed that his Bosnian colleagues found out about the so-called safaris in late 1993 and then passed on the information to Italy’s Sismi military intelligence in early 1994.
The response from Sismi came a couple of months later, he said. They found out that “safari” tourists would fly from the northern Italian border city of Trieste and then travel to the hills above Sarajevo.
“We’ve put a stop to it and there won’t be any more safaris,” the officer was told, according to Ansa news agency. Within two to three months the trips had stopped.
Ezio Gavazzeni, who usually writes about terrorism and the mafia, first read about the sniper tours to Sarajevo three decades ago when Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera reported the story, but without firm evidence.
He returned to the topic after seeing “Sarajevo Safari”, a documentary film from 2022 by Slovenian director Miran Zupanic which alleges that those involved in the killings came from several countries, including the US and Russia as well as Italy.
Gavazzeni began to dig further and in February handed prosecutors his findings, said to amount to a 17-page file including a report by former Sarajevo mayor Benjamina Karic.