Wealthy foreigners from across the world, particularly from Italy, the US and Russia, have been accused of paying Serbian forces to take part in horrific shooting sprees during the Bosnian War in the 1990s. These rich tourists paid tens of thousands of pounds to join in the shooting of civilians during the siege of Sarajevo, according to allegations being investigated by Italian authorities.
According to the claims, gun enthusiasts and far-Right extremists – sympathetic to the Serbian cause or motivated by bloodthirstiness, or both – travelled to the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina during the siege, which lasted from April 1992 to February 1996, where they were given Sniper rifles to pick off Bosnians “for fun”. They would pay the modern-day equivalent of €80,000 to €100,000 (£70k-88k) to partake in the “sport”, with foreigners paying more to shoot children and men who were armed and in uniform, according to witnesses and investigators. Serbia has denied the claims.
These “war tourists” were allegedly allowed to shoot at civilians by Bosnian Serb militias under the command of the warlord Radovan Karadzic. He was convicted of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and is now imprisoned for life in HMP Parkhurst on the Isle of Wight.
According to The Telegraph, prosecutors in Milan are now trying to identify Italians who were allegedly involved in the killings and hope to bring charges of “voluntary homicide aggravated by cruelty and abject motives”.
Similar claims have been made in the past, but have now resurfaced thanks to a formal case launched by Benjamina Karic, a former mayor of Sarajevo.
A former US Marine, John Jordan, testified to the UN-led ad hoc international criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in 2007 that “tourist shooters” travelled to Sarajevo to take shots at civilians for their own enjoyment. He said he witnessed one foreigner “show up with a weapon that seems more suited to wild boar hunting in the Black Forest than to urban combat in the Balkans”, adding that the individual handled the weapon like “a novice”.
There is one well-known documented case of a foreigner shooting at civilians from the hills surrounding the city. Eduard Limonov, a Russian nationalist, was filmed firing a machine gun down on the besieged city in 1992. He was accompanied by Karadzic.
The Siege of Sarajevo stands as the longest battle in modern history, lasting 1,425 days—three times longer than the 872-day German siege of Leningrad during World War II. A total of 13,952 people were killed during the siege, including 5,434 civilians.
Today, the city is dotted with around 200 memorials known as the Sarajevo Roses, made from concrete scars caused by the explosion of a mortar shell, which were later filled with red resin.