Between 1992 and 1996, foreigners paid high prices to go to Bosnia and shoot civilians, Italian media reports. According to Il Giornale, around 200 Italians took part in what the media called “human safaris to Sarajevo.”
The Milan prosecutor's office has now opened an investigation into a group of Italian "weekend snipers" - people who are said to have paid Serbian soldiers to participate in the siege of Sarajevo and shoot people "for fun".
The price list: the equivalent of over half a million kronor to kill children, a little less for men. Women didn't cost much and they were allowed to shoot the elderly for free, writes Il Giornale .
The investigation aims initially to identify the Italians who are said to have participated in the massacres. According to testimonies collected, they were mostly "right-wing gun lovers" who gathered in Trieste before the weekend and were transported from there to the mountains around Sarajevo, where they paid Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic's militias to shoot civilians in the besieged city. Karadzic was sentenced to 40 years in prison in 2016 for genocide in Bosnia's Srebrenica.
Over 10,000 people were killed in Sarajevo during the siege of 1992–1996.
As early as 1995, the Corriere della Sera newspaper reported on Italian snipers in Bosnia, but there was no evidence to open a legal investigation. The allegations resurfaced in the 2022 documentary “Sarajevo Safari,” which tells the story of wealthy foreigners who participated in the massacres for a lot of money.
When the state of Yugoslavia collapsed in 1992, a bloody civil war broke out in which the Bosnian Serbs did not want to recognize a Bosnian declaration of independence and formed their own state, Republika Srpska.
The subsequent war was characterized by war crimes and ethnic cleansing, largely committed by Bosnian Serb forces. In the Srebrenica massacre of July 1995, around 8,000 Bosniak boys and men were killed in the largest genocide in Europe since World War II.
During the war, a total of around 100,000 people were killed and over two million were forced to flee. The siege of the capital Sarajevo lasted almost four years, one of the longest in modern history.
In the Dayton Peace Agreement of 1995, Bosnia and Herzegovina was divided into two self-governing parts, usually referred to as "entities": the Federation, where mainly Bosniaks and Bosnian Croats live, and the Republika Srpska, where the majority are Bosnian Serbs.
