According to the suspicion, ordinary citizens with connections to the far right and deep affection for weapons hired an underground service and flew from the city of Trieste in Italy to the city of Belgrade via direct flights operating during those years, to participate in a killing spree that included sniping at citizens of Sarajevo from the hills overlooking main streets in the city, which was a war zone in the early and mid-1990s. According to preliminary investigation findings, the "kill tourism package" was priced at sums equivalent to between $84,000 and $105,000 (80,000-100,000 euros), with shooting at children receiving higher pricing. In most cases, the killing spree occurred on weekends, since the participants were middle-aged people with capital who were busy with their legitimate work during the week.
The sniping incidents in the hills of Sarajevo were part of the siege of the city of Sarajevo, which today serves as the capital city of Bosnia, that occurred during the Bosnian War (1992-1995). Snipers of the Army of Republika Srpska were deployed on the hills of Sarajevo, which allowed them to shoot at civilians and soldiers within the city, which was besieged for close to four years. Now authorities are examining whether the rumors about kill tourism are founded, and who were those who participated in it and initiated it.
The complaint filed with Italian law enforcement comprises 17 pages and was prepared by the writer and journalist Ezio Gavazzeni, with support from the famous former judge Guido Salvini and the former mayor of Sarajevo (2021-2024), Benjamina Karić. Gavazzeni collected information on a subject about which rumors have spread for years, as mentioned, and were even exposed in 2023 in a documentary film by Slovenian director Miran Zupanič. This film included testimonies and hints at the possibility that wealthy foreigners paid to travel to the Bosnian city to participate in a human hunting expedition and shoot people themselves.
According to the writer and journalist Ezio Gavazzeni, the Bosnian prosecutor's office buried the investigation due to the difficulty in investigating the case, while in Serbia, they treat the affair as an "urban legend," and therefore, he decided to open the investigation file in Italy. "We are talking about people with money, with reputation, businessmen, who during the siege on Sarajevo paid so they could kill unarmed civilians. They left Trieste for hunting and then returned and continued their regular lives," Gavazzeni noted in interviews with the Italian media.
According to various estimates, the number of participants in the "sniping expeditions" is approximately one hundred, comprising citizens from all over the world. Prosecutor Alessandro Gobbis noted there is a list of several people who can give testimony and will be called to testify. According to Gavazzeni, among the witnesses is a Bosnian intelligence agent with the initials ES, who was aware of the events and claims that the Italian secret services, which had staff people in Sarajevo, had information about this in 1993 and that classified files exist regarding the matter. "He told me that the Bosnian intelligence warned against the presence of at least five Italians, who were in the hills around Sarajevo, and were preparing to shoot at civilians," declared the Italian journalist and writer Gavazzeni, who claimed that same intelligence man learned for the first time about the phenomenon through documents of the Bosnian military security service to which he was exposed. These documents, according to him, contained an interrogation transcript of a Serbian volunteer who was captured by the Bosnians, who noted that the human hunting expeditions indeed exist. He joined the Bosnian Serbian militias, and on an expedition from Belgrade to Bosnia-Herzegovina, he was accompanied by at least five foreigners, three of whom were Italian, and one of whom claimed to be from Milan. All of them joined the human hunting expedition.
The name of a Serbian officer, Jovica Stanišić, who was convicted of war crimes by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, came up as one of the people involved in organizing these expeditions. The expeditions were disguised as hunting trips abroad, as a cover to justify the group's flights to Belgrade. According to that agent, "the Bosnian intelligence services believed that the Serbian security service was behind everything and that the Serbian military intelligence service was also involved, with the help of Serbian commanders in the occupied area."
Correspondence from Bosnian intelligence bodies was found that hints at the involvement of people who participated in those human hunting expeditions. The correspondence is based on the testimony of that Serbian volunteer who claimed that, "a man from Turin, one from Milan, and the last from Trieste. The person from Milan was an owner of a private clinic specializing in cosmetic procedures; he participated in one of the hunting expeditions." The correspondence also contains information about the distorted pricing. "Children cost more than armed men and women in uniform, and senior citizens can be killed for free."
The Bosnian consul in Milan, Dag Domoročić, promised "full cooperation" from his country's government. "We are eager to expose the truth about such a cruel affair and settle accounts with the past. I have information that I will contribute to the investigation," he declared.
In the past, photographs of Russian writer Eduard Limonov in the hills of Sarajevo, alongside Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadžić, were well-known and controversial. In the photographs, he appears apparently observing the snipers located on the hills and shooting at people, and he himself is positioned near a machine gun and firing several shots. Estimates are that approximately 11,000 people were killed as a result of the sniping carried out by the militias during those years.
As part of the investigation entrusted to the Special Operations Unit of Italian law enforcement, the Milan public prosecutor's office will summon witnesses for questioning in the coming weeks and will consolidate all documents and existing testimonies regarding the affair.
