An Italian man is being investigated over allegations that he paid members of the Bosnian Serb army to travel to Sarajevo, where he killed civilians during the four-year siege of the city in the 1990s.
Prosecutors in Milan are investigating individuals related to what has become known as “sniper tourism”.
The 80-year-old Italian is being investigated for murder, a source told The Guardian. A former truck driver from the northern Italian region of Veneto, he is the first suspect to be placed under investigation since the Italian prosecutor’s office launched investigations in November.

According to Italian media reports, the suspect boasted of “conducting a manhunt.”
About 14,000 people are reported to have been killed in the siege of Sarajevo from April 1992 to the end of February 1996.

Snipers were the most feared element of life under siege, as they killed people in the streets, including children. Sarajevo is surrounded by mountains, which made attacking it particularly easy.
Groups of people of foreign nationalities, known as “sniper tourists”, allegedly participated in the massacre by paying large sums of money to Bosnian Serb soldiers led by Radovan Karadžić, who in 2016 was found guilty of genocide and crimes against humanity.

The “tourists” were transported to the hills around Sarajevo in order to shoot people.

Investigation in Italy was prompted by a legal complaint filed by Ezio Gavazzeni, a Milan-based writer who gathered evidence for the allegations. A report was also sent to prosecutors by former Sarajevo mayor Benjamina Kariq.

Gavazzeni said he first read about reports of “sniper tourists” in Italian media in the 1990s, but it wasn’t until he saw the 2022 documentary “Sarajevo Safari” by Slovenian director Miran Zupanic that he began to investigate further.

In the documentary, a former Serbian soldier and a contractor said that citizens of Western countries were shooting at the civilian population from the hills around Sarajevo.

Speaking to The Guardian in November, Gavazzeni said that the Italian suspects would meet in the northern city of Trieste and travel to Belgrade, where members of the Bosnian Serb army would accompany them to the hills of Sarajevo.

Regarding “sniper tourism”, Croatian journalist Domago Margetic has the prosecutor in Milan, the president of Serbia, Aleksandar Vučić. He also sent video and photos of Vucic in Sarajevo during the siege. Vucic denied the accusations.

Source: prizrenpost