Prosecutors in Milan have opened an investigation into Italians who allegedly paid members of the Bosnian Serb army to travel to Sarajevo so they could kill citizens during the city's four-year siege in the 1990s.
More than 10,000 people were killed in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, by constant shelling and sniper fire between 1992 and 1996, in what was the longest siege in modern history, foreign media write, reports Telegraph.
Snipers were perhaps the most terrifying element of life under siege in Sarajevo, because they would kill people in the streets, including children, at random, as if it were a video game or a safari, he writes further. The Guardian.
According to him, groups of Italians and other nationalities, so-called "sniper tourists", are suspected of having participated in the massacre after paying large sums of money to soldiers belonging to the army of Radovan Karadzic, the former Bosnian Serb leader who in 2016 was found guilty of genocide and other crimes against humanity, to be transported to the hills around Sarajevo so that they could shoot at the population for pleasure.
Sarajevo is located in an area surrounded by mountains, which made attacking it particularly easy.
Milan prosecutors, led by Alessandro Gobbi, launched an investigation aimed at identifying the Italians involved on charges of "voluntary manslaughter."
The investigation began with a legal complaint filed by Ezio Gavazzeni, a Milan-based writer who gathered evidence on the allegations, as well as a report sent to prosecutors by the former mayor of Sarajevo, Benjamina Karic.
Gavazzeni said he first read reports about suspected tourist snipers in the Italian press in the 1990s, but it was only after watching “Sarajevo Safari,” a 2022 documentary by Slovenian director Miran Zupanić, that he began to investigate further.
In the documentary, a former Serbian soldier and a contractor claimed that Western groups would shoot the civilian population from the hills around Sarajevo.
Their claims have been vehemently denied by Serbian war veterans.
"The Sarajevo safari was the starting point," Gavazzeni said. "I started a correspondence with the director and from there I expanded my investigation until I gathered enough material to present to the Milan prosecutors."
Gavazzeni claimed that "many, many, many Italians" were suspected of being involved, without giving a figure.
“There were Germans, French, English… people from all the Western countries who paid huge sums of money to be taken there to shoot civilians.”
Gavazzeni added: "There were no political or religious motives. They were wealthy people who went there for entertainment and personal pleasure. We're talking about people who love guns and who probably go to shooting ranges or on safari in Africa."
He claimed that the Italian suspects would meet in the northern city of Trieste and travel to Belgrade, from where Bosnian Serb soldiers would escort them to the hills of Sarajevo.
"There was a traffic of war tourists who went there to shoot people," he said.
Gavazenni stressed that he had identified several of the Italian individuals suspected of being involved and who are expected to be questioned by prosecutors in the coming weeks.
The most high-profile deaths from sniper fire were perhaps Boško Brkić and Admira Ismić, a couple documented in the film Romeo and Juliet in Sarajevo, who were killed by a sniper in 1993 while trying to cross a bridge.
Their bodies remained in no-man's land between Bosniak and Bosnian Serb positions for several days.
The photographs were widely published and became a symbol of the randomness and inhumanity of war.
The main road leading to Sarajevo, Mesha Selimović Boulevard, was called "Sniper Road" because it became extremely dangerous, but could not be avoided as it was the route to Sarajevo Airport.
Trams and buses had their windows closed and there were signs warning of snipers all around.
Nicola Brigida, a lawyer who helped Gavazzeni prepare his case, said: "The evidence gathered after a long investigation [by Gavazzeni] is well-supported and could lead to serious investigations to identify the culprits. There is also the report from the former mayor of Sarajevo." /Telegraph/
