Wealthy foreign gun enthusiasts paid Bosnian Serb forces for the chance to shoot residents of Sarajevo during the siege of the city during the 1990s, according to claims being investigated by Italian magistrates.
The investigation was prompted by new evidence that “weekend snipers” paid handsomely to line the hills around Sarajevo and join in the Bosnian Serb siege, which killed more than 11,500 people between 1992 and 1996 during the Balkan Wars.
The investigation into the alleged “human safari” in Sarajevo has been opened after years of research by the Italian writer Ezio Gavazzeni, who said a key source was a former Bosnian intelligence officer
I hope they spend the rest of their lives in prison, but I’m not really expecting anyone to see the inside of a prison cell.
Word. I have to keep telling myself ”This has to be AI slop. It’s preposterous that something this monstrous could possibly be real!” just to function.
Absolutely, if true. I don’t have much faith in Italian law enforcement - they tend to be somewhat excitable. Didn’t they accuse Amanda Knox of Satanism?
I remember hearing about this some time ago - maybe a couple of years or so. It didn’t make the same splash then that it seems to have done now. Had not heard anyting since.
Gavazzeni started investigating after watching the 2022 documentary Sarajevo Safari , by the Slovenian film-maker Miran Zupanic. The film quoted an unnamed American former spy saying that he had seen visitors paying to shoot civilians. Serbian veterans have denied the claims.
Apparently, while there were reports of the “human safari” participants coming from all over Europe, the writer Ezio Gavazzeni is following up on reports of more easily tracked Italian citizens, and whose informant was apparently in the Italian secret service. So Gavazzeni is trying to get access to those reports to directly identify probable subjects.
So, really, still a LOT hanging on the reporting of a claimed secret service representative, but IF correct, there should be documentation in the government archives somewhere. Though it may be more non-specific/verified than the writer hopes.
While I don’t have much faith in the lower recesses of human nature, this has “urban legend being pumped by sensationalist writer” written all over it.
While absolutely nothing about the Balkan conflict would have surprised me when the news really got out a few years later, if there was any truth to THIS, it would have emerged long ago.
We recall the story of the Bosnian father whose eyelids were sliced off so that he could be forced to watch his daughters’ being raped and murdered, and can encompass this into the overall narrative.
Meanwhile, that Minnesota dentist who shot the old lion back in 2015 is feeling “so am I really all that bad?”
Would it though? I mean we aren’t talking about Bill Gates or Richard Branson going human hunting. What would have been the impetus to to expose some Milan plastic surgeon? (among the Serbs who would have needed to cooperate to expose him)
Not that it’s definitely true. I agree it has some urban myth aspects. But also rumors have been circulating since the siege, I wouldn’t rule it out completely either
That’s my feeling as well. If there was meat to it, it wouldn’t have taken thirty years for it to actually see the light of day. Someone, somewhere would have talked, or some sort of archive would have been opened, or something would have come to light.
My gut tells me that it’s probably some sort of situation where there was some kind of foreign sniper involved, and that over time things got garbled.
I mean, we’ve all known situations where a relatively innocuous event occurred in middle/high school, and by the end of the day, the rumors are inflated and have little actual relationship to the actual events. I have a feeling this is the same sort of thing, only compounded by the fog of war and thirty years.
I’m not totally convinced by this. It’s not like any huge well known celebrities are involved. If there were then it would absolutely be known. These are just some random rich Italians, it’s not going to make the front page of every paper on the planet if/when their names are made public.
But tons of heinous stuff happened in the Yugoslavian civil wars. There really isn’t any strong reason for the perpetrators to go on record about it. There was no “Peace and Reconciliation committee” for the Yugoslavian civil war
I honestly wouldn’t be surprised, I’ve heard allegations of well-off people engaging in human hunting in war zones before. It seems to be one of those recurring rumors.
Although I wouldn’t be surprised if it actually happened somewhere, either. The sadism of the wealthy and the dishonesty of attention seekers are both issues literally going back to ancient times.
There is the (tourist-adjacent) case of Russian writer Eduard Limonov, who visited Sarajevo in 1992 as a guest of the Bosnian Serbs.
“In a BBC film about [Radovan] Karadzic, the leader of the [Bosnian] Serbs smiles as he sights down a cannon barrel and then offers a Russian visitor, the nationalist writer Eduard Limonov, the chance to fire off a shell into Karadzic’s former city. (Limonov gladly accepts.)” – Frontline, PBS
Limonov once wrote in a book that he had “fought” in Bosnia but, when questioned by a reporter, insisted that he was just “a freelance journalist” there.
