Aleksandar Vučić, Photo: Presidency of Serbia/Dimitrije Goll
21.11.2025. 21:10h
Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić has denied allegations linking him to the so-called “weekend snipers” in Sarajevo during the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the 1990s.
Vučić told TV Informer that he had never carried a sniper rifle and announced lawsuits against the media that reported this about him, adding that he would hire the world’s best lawyers, Radio Television of Serbia reported.
Croatian investigative journalist Domagoj Margetić said on Tuesday that he had forwarded information to the prosecutor’s office in Milan, which is investigating the “weekend snipers,” that Vučić had participated in or assisted in “sniper tourism,” in which wealthy foreigners allegedly paid Serbian forces around besieged Sarajevo to shoot civilians in that city.
In an interview with TV Informer, Vučić said that he had not heard of such a “safari”.
“But that doesn’t matter. I didn’t have a gun, even when I came and asked if I could be with you, they told me ‘kid, come back, we need a journalist, who knows English’. There’s so much nonsense and everyone knows that, I have footage, witnesses and where they say there was a gun, there was a camera tripod, I carried it to the cameraman,” Vučić said.
He added that he would hire the world’s best lawyers to sue the Guardian, the Daily Mail and other media outlets that wrote about it.
Vučić said he believes he can get millions in lawsuits from these media outlets.
“I just have to see how they defined it, what they defined it, what the lawyers will tell me,” said the Serbian President.
The Guardian reported that “the Serbian president is facing legal charges in the Sarajevo ‘sniper tourism’ case,” reporting that Margetić had filed a complaint with prosecutors in Milan.
The British tabloid Daily Mail stated that “the Serbian president has been accused of participating in ‘human safaris'”, also reporting Margetić’s allegations.
On Thursday, during the regional business conference of Great Britain and the Western Balkans, Vučić, answering questions from journalists, rejected accusations of connections with “weekend dreamers”.
Italian media reported in early October that prosecutors in Milan had launched an investigation into Italians who allegedly gave huge sums of money to Serbian forces so that they could act as “weekend snipers” during the siege of Sarajevo, killing citizens for fun.
The case was initiated by prosecutor Alessandro Gobis on charges of premeditated murder aggravated by cruelty and base motives.
The charges are currently being brought against unknown individuals, and stem from a lawsuit filed by journalist and writer Ezio Gavazeni, with the help of two lawyers and former judge Guido Salvini.
According to testimonies collected 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 around Sarajevo, where they could shoot at the population of the besieged city after paying off Bosnian Serb forces.
During the nearly four years of siege of Sarajevo, according to data from victims’ associations and verdicts by international courts, every tenth child killed in the city was hit by a sniper’s bullet. More than 14.000 children were wounded.
Despite this, not a single sniper has been held personally accountable – neither before the courts in BiH nor before international courts.
The Hague Tribunal concluded in its verdicts against the highest officials of Republika Srpska that the sniper campaign had one goal: “terrorizing the civilians of Sarajevo.”
Former Hague Prosecutor’s Office spokeswoman Florence Hartmann tells RFE/RL that the Hague tribunal was aware of the existence of “death tourism expeditions.”
“We knew about it, I don’t know what to call it. We didn’t know how it was organized. It is extremely important that a judicial investigation has been launched and that it must be investigated who the organizers were,” said Artman.
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