Wealthy foreigners paid large sums to become "weekend snipers" and be able to shoot civilians during the siege of Sarajevo. This is according to an investigation by Italian authorities, cited by the Italian newspaper La Repubblica and the British newspaper The Telegraph.
According to reports, wealthy gun and hunting enthusiasts and far-right extremists traveled to the war-torn city in the 1990s, armed with snipers, to kill Bosnians "for fun."
These foreigners - from Italy, the United States, Russia and other countries - are accused of paying Serbian forces to take part in the siege and shoot people during the Bosnian war.
Their motives, according to investigators, ranged from sympathy for the Serbian cause to pure bloodlust - or both. Serbian authorities have vehemently denied the allegations.
Witnesses and Italian investigators claim that there was even a price list for the killings - higher sums were paid for shooting children and armed men in uniform. According to the newspaper La Repubblica, "amateur snipers" paid amounts equivalent to between 80,000 and 100,000 euros to participate in this sinister "entertainment".
According to the investigation, during the siege between 1992 and 1996, groups of Italians gathered in the border town of Trieste, from where they were transported to the hills around Sarajevo. Over 11,500 people lost their lives during the siege, making it the longest siege in modern Europe.
The so-called "war tourists" of various nationalities - including Americans and Russians - were given permission to shoot civilians under the control of Bosnian Serb militias commanded by Radovan Karadzic.
The Milan prosecutor's office is trying to identify which Italians took part in the killings in order to charge them with "premeditated murder aggravated by cruelty and base motives".
The investigation also involves officers from the Carabinieri's special unit - the Raggruppamento Operativo Speciale, which fights terrorism and organized crime.
Similar allegations have surfaced before, but have now been renewed in a formal complaint filed by former Sarajevo mayor Benjamina Karic "against unknown persons". "A team of tireless people is fighting to make this complaint heard," she told the Italian news agency ANSA.
The case was taken up by Italian journalist and writer Ezio Gavazzeni, supported by two lawyers and a former judge.
"There was a price list for these killings - children cost the most, then men, preferably armed and in uniform, then women, and adults could be killed for free," Gavazzeni told La Repubblica.
He expressed horror that wealthy Italians had paid to travel to Bosnia to hunt people. "They would leave Trieste to hunt people, then go home and continue their ordinary lives - respected by everyone who knew them," he added.
The investigation indicates that the killings were carried out with the knowledge of Serbian intelligence.
The prosecution will examine the testimony of former Bosnian intelligence officer Edin Subasic, who received information about the "weekend snipers" from a captured Serbian soldier.
Former US Marine John Jordan testified before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in 2007 that "shooting tourists" traveled to Sarajevo to shoot civilians for pleasure. He says he saw a foreigner with a weapon "more suited to hunting wild boar than for urban combat in the Balkans" who handled it "like a complete novice".
The claims of such "weekend snipers" were later confirmed by the Italian intelligence agency SISMI.
British Balkans expert Tim Judah told The Telegraph that it was possible that individual foreigners had paid to shoot at Sarajevo residents, but their numbers were unlikely to be large.
"Between 1992 and 1995 I spent a lot of time in Pale - the Bosnian Serb headquarters - and I never heard of anything like that. There were Russians and Greeks, but they fought as volunteers on the Serb side," he said.
One of the few documented cases is that of Russian nationalist Eduard Limonov, filmed in 1992 firing a machine gun into the besieged city, accompanied by Karadzic. Limonov died in Moscow in 2020.
Similar claims were made in the documentary "Sarajevo Safari" (2022) by Slovenian director Miran Županić, which tells the story of foreigners who paid to participate in "human hunts". In the film, a former American intelligence officer testifies that he saw "tourists paying to shoot at the besieged inhabitants of Sarajevo".
"At first I couldn't believe it - I thought it was an urban legend. But the idea that someone could pay to be allowed to kill people is something you can't accept," said Zupanic.
The film has sparked a backlash among Bosnian Serbs. Veljko Lazic, the president of a veterans' organization, called it "an absolute and disgusting lie" and "an insult to Republika Srpska, its army and the Serb victims of the war."