Sniper safaris: Italy investigates claim tourists paid to go to Bosnia to kill besieged civilians

Accusations that cashed-up foreigners paid tens of thousands of dollars to shoot civilians during the siege of Sarajevo on “sniper safaris” in the 1990s are now being investigated by Italian prosecutors.

The Milan prosecutor’s office has launched a probe into the allegations that extremists and gun enthusiasts flocked to the city during the Bosnian war to gun down fleeing civilians with sniper rifles for huge sums of money.

It is alleged the “weekend snipers” came from not just Italy, but the US, Russia and other countries, and paid Serbian forces for the chance to hunt fellow humans.

Investigators claims many were far-right extremists who had sided with the Serbs while others were simply fuelled by bloodlust. In some cases, they said it was a combination of both factors.

According to the complaint filed by journalist and novelist Ezio Gavazzeni, Serbian forces charged different rates for participants to kill men, women or children.

Mr Gavazzeni, the architect of the claims, said the snipers would shoot from Serb positions in the hills around Sarajevo.

While claims about foreigners taking advantage of the four-year siege of Sarajevo have been previously been made before, Mr Gavazzeni has amassed considerable evidence in his investigation, including a Bosnian military intelligence officer’s testimony.

That evidence was strong enough for Italian counter terror prosecutor Alessandro Gobbis to scrutinise, with an eye to bringing charges of murder against potential offenders.

The BBC reports that the Bosnian servicemen said his fellow officers had been told by a captured Serb soldier about the “sniper safaris” in late 1993, informing Italy’s military intelligence network of the macabre practice just months later.

Following up the claims, the Italian Sisimi intelligence service allegedly discovered that some tourists involved in the manhunts would fly from the northern Italian border city of Trieste and then on to Sarajevo’s hilly outskirts with Serbian forces, who had surrounded the city.

More than 11,500 people were killed during Sarajevo’s four-year siege -- the longest in modern European history.

Ansa news agency said the Bosnian officer was told by Italian representatives: “We’ve put a stop to it and there won’t be any more safaris.”

It’s believed the practice stopped by mid-1994.

Mr Gavazzeni began his investigation into the claims following reports in local Italian papers three decades ago, but which failed to back up the allegations with any firm evidence.

Now prosecutors are trying to find out the identities of Italians involved in the alleged killings with the assistance of a specialist unit of the Carabinieri police.

Mr Gavazzeni expressed his horror at the idea that middle-class Italians would head to Bosnia and embark on bloody manhunts as 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 told The Telegraph in London.

“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.”

While a former US Marine told the UN’s international criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in 2007 that “tourist shooters” would head from abroad to Sarajevo to fire at civilians, a veteran expert on the Balkans said he believed that while such a practice could have happened, the number of participants would have been fairly limited.

“From 1992 to 1995, I spent a lot of time in Pale, which was the HQ for Bosnian Serb forces,” Tim Judah 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.

“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.”