The sickening ‘sniper tourists’ of Sarajevo
We all enjoy something different on holiday. I love to pick a few interesting spots on a map, then potter between them and see what trouble I can get into on the way. Others prefer to be by the pool, listening to their music or turning the pages of one of the new books they picked up in WHSmiths in the airport.
Who are we to judge somebody’s choices? Different strokes for different folks and all of that. I’m sure there are plenty of people who’d despair at searching for statues of Vladimir Lenin on their holiday, but for me, it’s heaven.
However, there are some exceptions, people who use their holidays to be wrong ’uns. I don’t want to call anyone out personally, but if you’re a 67-year-old single American male in a Hawaiian shirt, patrolling the streets of Pattaya, then I’m talking about you. The same goes for anyone who spends their free time outside of the office stalking and shooting endangered animals.
Imagine my shock when I heard about a brand of tourists even more vile and sickening than sex tourists and big game hunters. It’s been alleged that at the height of the war in the Balkans in the 1990s, there were “sniper tourists” who paid to shoot and kill, on a grotesque “human safari”.
This isn’t a Squid Games prequel; this is real life, with Italian investigative writer Ezio Gavazzeni making some explosive claims that leave you questioning humanity.
“There were Germans, French, English … people from all Western countries who paid large sums of money to be taken there to shoot civilians”.
Ezio Gavazzeni
Italian authorities are taking the claims seriously enough that they launched an investigating, and it’s being reported that some Italians who have been linked to taking part will be contacted by prosecutors in the coming weeks. Taking a life is the ultimate taboo, and the thought of wealthy elites vacationing in a warzone to shoot at innocent civilians seems so dystopian and terrifying that it’s genuinely hard to process.
Not only did these “sniper tourists” in Sarajevo allegedly shoot at the civilians, but it is also claimed that some even paid an optional fee to shoot and murder children in cold blood. It’s said that these secretive millionaires travelled to the region, paying $90,000 to take part in this “human safari”.
With Sarajevo under a four-year siege between 1992 and 1996, these vile vacationers would allegedly pay off corrupt Bosnian Serb forces, who would allow them to perch overlooking the city and fire military sniper rifles at people going about their lives.
It goes without saying that there’s never an excuse for murder, and a human life is far more valuable than $90,000, but to learn that for these people it was sport is truly horrifying, but it’s what Gavazzeni is alleging. “There were no political or religious motivations. They were rich people who went there for fun and personal satisfaction. We are talking about people who love guns who perhaps go to shooting ranges or on safari in Africa.”
Whispers of this hellish blood sport had been initially circulated in the mid-1990s as the war raged, but Gavazzeni, looking into the claims after a 2022 documentary, saw a Serbian soldier claiming that he saw foreigners shooting from the hills in Sarajevo. His investigations saw him meet a Bosnian intelligence officer who corroborated these claims.
The wounds of that conflict are still open in the Balkans, and these revelations will only increase tensions in the region, an area that’s a powder keg at the best of times.
