Tourists ‘paid £70,000’ to shoot innocent people in ‘human safari’ hunting trips to Sarajevo

The siege of Sarajevo was watched by the West with horror in the early 1990s, as Serb-Bosnian militants shot at innocent civilians in ‘human safaris’.

More than 30 years later, prosecutors in Milan have opened an investigation into Italian tourists who are accused of paying £70,000 to join this ‘human safari’, shooting and killing innocent Bosnians.

Prosecutors allege these ‘tourists’, many of whom had ties to far-right circles, paid the Bosnian Serb army for weekend trips to Sarajevo, where they shot from rooftops at the city below.

They paid an additional fee to kill children with the sniper rifles, according to the court filing.

The shooting in the city was so bad that two main streets, Ulica Zmaja od Bosne and Meša Selimović Boulevard, were dubbed ‘sniper alley’.

Milan-based writer and journalist Ezio Gavazzeni said: ‘We are talking about wealthy people, with reputations – businessmen – who during the siege of Sarajevo paid to kill unarmed civilians.

‘They left Trieste for a manhunt and then returned to their respectable daily lives,’ he alleged.

There could be more than 100 ‘tourists’ who jetted off to the warzone and may be called to give evidence in the trial.

There are also allegations that Bosnian intelligence had proof of Italians in the hills surrounding Sarajevo.

The Bosnian consul in Milan, Dag Dumrukcic, told la Repubblica: ‘We are eager to uncover the truth about such a cruel matter and settle accounts with the past. I am aware of some information that I will contribute to the investigation.’

During the siege, Sarajevo’s electric, gas and water supplies were cut off – leaving those within the city with no access to vital infrastructure.

Former Bosnian Serb political leader Radovan Karadzic and the commander of the Bosnian Serb Army’s Sarajevo-Romanija Corps, Stanislav Galic, were both found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity at the Hague over the attack.

Both were eventually handed sentences of life imprisonment. Karadzic is serving his sentence in the UK, while Galic was taken to Germany.

The siege ended in 1995, leaving 13,952 people dead. 5,434 of these casualties were civilians. 

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