Milan prosecutors have opened a probe
into Italians who allegedly gave huge sums of money to Serbian
militia so they could become “weekend snipers” killing Bosnian
citizens for kicks during the 1993-95 Siege of Sarajevo in which
11,000 people died, Il Giorno and la Repubbica reported Monday.
The mostly far-right gun fanatics allegedly left Italy, paying
“huge” sums to Serbian soldiers to participate in the siege of
Sarajevo and shoot citizens of the Bosnian capital “for fun”
during the war, the two dailies said.
To identify these “war tourists,” an investigation is underway
in Milan aimed at identifying those who participated in the
massacre.
The case—which Il Giornale had already reported on in July—was
opened by prosecutor Alessandro Gobbis on charges of voluntary
homicide aggravated by cruelty and abject motives.
The charges are currently being brought against unknown persons,
stemming from a complaint filed by journalist and writer Ezio
Gavazzeni, with the assistance of two lawyers and former
magistrate Guido Salvini.
According to testimonies gathered from across northern Italy,
these “weekend snipers,” mostly far-right sympathizers with a
passion for weapons, gathered in Trieste and were then taken to
the hills surrounding Sarajevo, where they could fire on the
population of the besieged city after paying Radovan Karadzic’s
Bosnian Serb militias.
The case file also contains a report on these “rich foreigners
engaged in inhumane activities,” sent to the Milan Prosecutor’s
Office by former Sarajevo mayor Benjamina Karic.
For now, the investigation records only include the documents
submitted by the author of the complaint, dated January 28, and
in the coming weeks, prosecutor Alessandro Gobbis, with
responsibility for the Carabinieri ROS special operations unit,
will have to investigate, possibly interviewing the people
indicated by the writer.
For now, the writer explains, “these are just ‘tips,'” but there
was also apparently “a price tag for these killings: children
cost more, then men (preferably in uniform and armed), women,
and finally old people, who could be killed for free.”
The writer also references the 2022 documentary “Sarajevo
Safari” and clarifies that “director Miran Zupanic gave us the
passwords to access the restricted viewing of the film on the Al
Jazeera website, and I can provide them to the magistrate who
requests them.”
The film also features an “anonymous” witness.
And again: “Some sources speak of Americans, Canadians, and
Russians, but also Italians, who were willing to pay to play
war.”
The clients, the former Bosnian 007 said, were “certainly very
wealthy people” who could “financially afford such an
adrenaline-fueled challenge.”
Given the way “everything was organized, the Bosnian
intelligence services believed that the Serbian State Security
Service was behind it all.”
And with “the infrastructure of the former Serbian charter and
tourism airline Aviogenex.” Jovica Stanišić, “convicted of war
crimes by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former
Yugoslavia, played a key role in this service.”
According to the complaint, among these “sniper tourists” were
also hunting and weapons enthusiasts. And the “hunting cover
served to bring the groups to their destination in Belgrade
without suspicion.”
According to an excerpt from the testimony of John Jordan, a
former American firefighter who volunteered in the besieged city
of Sarajevo in the 1990s, before the International Criminal
Court in The Hague in the trial of Bosnian Serb Army commander
Ratko Mladic, “on more than one occasion, I witnessed people who
didn’t seem like locals to me because of their clothing, the
weapons they carried, the way they were treated, managed, and
even led by locals. I saw this in Sarajevo on several
occasions.”
Passages from this 2007 deposition—which refers specifically to
the so-called “tourist shooters,” whom the Milan Prosecutor’s
Office will also begin investigating—are also included in writer
Gavazzeni’s complaint to the Milan prosecutors.
“It was clearly evident,” the testimony from 18 years ago
continues, “that the person guided by men who knew the terrain
well was completely unfamiliar with the terrain, and his
clothing and the weapons he was carrying made me think they were
tourist shooters.”
And again: “When a boy shows up with a weapon that seems more
suited to wild boar hunting in the Black Forest than to urban
combat in the Balkans…. When you see him handle it and you
realize he’s a novice…”
Currently, among other things, a photography exhibition entitled
‘Shooting in Sarajevo’ is underway at the Casa della Memoria in
Milan, which commemorates the siege of the city 30 years ago.
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