An elderly Italian man is under investigation as part of an investigation by prosecutors in Milan into individuals who allegedly paid members of the Bosnian Serb army for trips to Sarajevo so they could kill citizens during the four-year siege of the city in the 1990s.
According to The Guardian, the 80-year-old is being investigated on charges of aggravated murder. The elderly man, a former truck driver from the northern Italian region of Veneto, is the first suspect to be put under investigation since the investigation began in November.
More than 10,000 people were killed in Sarajevo by shelling and sniper fire between 1992 and 1996 in the longest siege in modern history, after Bosnia and Herzegovina declared independence from Yugoslavia. Snipers were perhaps the most terrifying element of life under siege, because they killed people in the streets, including children.
Groups of Italians and people of other nationalities, so-called "sniper tourists", are suspected of taking part in the massacre after paying large sums of money to soldiers belonging to the army of Radovan Karadzic, the former Bosnian Serb leader who was found guilty of genocide and other crimes against humanity in 2016, to transport them to the hills around Sarajevo so they could shoot people for... pleasure.
The investigation in Italy began with a legal complaint filed by Ezio Gavazzeni, a Milan-based writer who gathered evidence on the allegations, as well as a report sent to prosecutors by former Sarajevo mayor Benjamina Karić. Gavazzeni said he had first read reports about tourists suspected of being snipers in the Italian press in the 1990s, but it was only after watching Sarajevo Safari, a 2022 documentary by Slovenian director Miran Zupanič, that he began to investigate further.
In the documentary, a former Serbian soldier and a contractor said that Western groups would shoot civilians from the hills around Sarajevo. The claims have been vehemently denied by Serbian war veterans.
Speaking to the Guardian in November, Gavazzeni said the Italian suspects would meet in the northern city of Trieste and travel to Belgrade, from where Bosnian Serb soldiers would escort them to the Sarajevo hills.
"There was a traffic of war tourists who went there to shoot people," he said.
