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Rich foreigners paid large sums of money to shoot at terrified civilians during the 1990s siege of Sarajevo, according to extraordinary allegations being investigated by Italian prosecutors.
Prosecutors are examining allegations that far-right extremists and gun enthusiasts from Italy, the United States, Russia and other countries travelled to Bosnia and paid Serbian forces to let them fire at city residents as a form of “war tourism”.
According to La Repubblica, foreigners paid the modern-day equivalent of between €80,000 and €100,000 each to take part, with a “price list” allegedly listing varying rates depending on the target.
“[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,” Ezio Gavazzeni, a journalist, told the Italian newspaper.
“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 added.
open image in gallery
A child during the siege of Sarajevo in 1992 (Copyright 1992. The Associated Press. All rights reserved)
The case was filed 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 Italy’s ANSA news agency.
Investigators are working with the Raggruppamento Operativo Speciale, a Carabinieri unit that handles terrorism and organised crime, and prosecutors want to identify any Italians who took part, to face charges of “voluntary homicide aggravated by cruelty and abject motives.”
Witnesses say the trips were arranged from the north-eastern city of Trieste. Participants were allegedly taken to sniper positions in the hills overlooking Sarajevo by Bosnian Serb militias loyal to Radovan Karadzic, who was later convicted of genocide and crimes against humanity. Serbia has denied any role in the alleged killings but investigators believe Serbian intelligence services were aware of, or involved in, the operation.
Edin Subasic, a former Bosnian intelligence officer, said a captured Serb soldier told him Italians had paid to fire sniper rifles at civilians.
A former US marine, John Jordan, testified to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in 2007 that “tourist shooters” came to Sarajevo “to take pot shots at civilians for their own gratification.” He said one man arrived with a hunting rifle “more suited to wild boar than to urban combat” and handled it “like a novice.”
The siege of Sarajevo was the longest in modern European history, with more than 11,500 people killed.
The Italian intelligence agency SISMI reportedly confirmed at the time that foreign “weekend snipers” had visited Sarajevo.
Tim Judah, a British journalist and Balkans specialist, said the allegations were possible but limited in terms of the number of people who took part.
“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. “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.”
A known case involved the Russian nationalist Eduard Limonov, who was filmed in 1992 firing on Sarajevo alongside Karadzic. Limonov died in Moscow in 2020.