The Milan Prosecutor’s Office has opened an investigation into a chilling case, which brings to light the infamous sniper avenue in Sarajevo, the city besieged from 1992 to 1996 by the Bosnian Serb militias during the war in Bosnia. From the hills they shot at passers-by who had no choice but to walk down that street risking being hit. It is estimated that more than 11,000 civilians were killed in this way. The thesis of this investigation, revealed by the Italian media and which investigates an alleged crime of manslaughter with the aggravating circumstance of cruelty and abject motives, is that there were Italians who paid to go to Sarajevo for the weekend and be able to shoot people, as if on a hunting trip.
Ordinary citizens, close to far-right circles and gun enthusiasts, who took on this service as a human safari in the besieged city. According to the complaint, they were on a Trieste-Belgrade flight of the Serbian company Aviogenex, which was operating from the Italian airport at the time. To be weekend snipers they paid the equivalent of between 80,000 and 100,000 euros, according to the initial hypotheses of the investigation. They paid more to shoot children. The information that emerged speaks of a Milanese entrepreneur who owns a private aesthetic clinic, and of citizens of Turin and Trieste.
The complaint, documented in 17 pages, came from the writer and journalist Ezio Gavazzeni, supported by the well-known former magistrate Guido Salvini and the former mayor of Sarajevo from 2021 to 2024, Benjamina Karic, who gathered information on something that had been rumored for years and which crystallized in 2023 in Sarajevo Safari, a documentary by Slovenian Miran Zupanic. This film collected testimonies and provided clues to the possibility that foreign millionaires paid to travel to the Bosnian city so they could shoot human beings themselves.
The Bosnian Prosecutor’s Office closed an investigation due to the difficulty of investigating the case in a country still very divided and destroyed by war, Gavazzeni told the newspaper on Tuesday. The Republic. As regards Serbian justice, he assures that for the courts of this country the issue is “an urban legend”. This is why he tried to open the case in Italy. “We are talking about rich people, with reputations, businessmen, who during the siege of Sarajevo paid to be able to kill unarmed civilians. They left Trieste for a manhunt and then returned and continued their usual life, respectable in everyone’s eyes”, he claims.
Prosecutor Alessandro Gobbis has a list of several people who will be able to contribute to his testimony and who will be called to testify. According to the writer, there could be around a hundred bloodthirsty war tourists. “I hope they can spot at least one or two, maybe ten,” he says.
Among the witnesses, says Gavazzeni, there is an agent of the Bosnian secret services with the initials ES who was aware of the facts and assures that the Italian secret services, which had personnel in Sarajevo, had information about them in 1993 and that there would have been confidential files on the episode. “He told me that Bosnian intelligence had warned of the presence of at least five Italians, who were in the hills around Sarajevo, accompanied to shoot civilians”, he assured.
It also mentions an official of the Slovenian secret services, some victims and a wounded firefighter who, already in the trial against Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic in The Hague, had spoken of “tourist shooters” with different clothes and weapons who had attracted attention among the Serbian soldiers.
The Bosnian consul in Milan, Dag Dumrukcic, guaranteed the “full collaboration” of his country’s government. “We are eager to find out the truth about such a cruel matter and to settle the score with the past. I know some information that I will provide to the investigation,” he said.
In the past, the images of the Russian writer Eduard Limonov on the hills of Sarajevo, together with the Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, were also well known and very controversial. In them they showed him how snipers shot people, and he stood in front of the machine gun and fired a few shots.
