Four days after Irina Cisic’s first birthday in 1993, her mother and father took her outside for a walk in the war-torn city of Sarajevo.
It was a beautiful day by all accounts, apart from the near-constant threat of shells and bullets raining down from the surrounding hills that made the very air lethal.
Curled up in her mother’s arms outside their family home, a sniper bullet struck Irina that day. She died in hospital hours later, her small body too fragile to recover from the trauma of the strike.
Irina was one of 11,541 victims, 1,601 of them children, who were killed between 1992 and 1996 during the Bosnian Serb siege of the majority-Muslim city, where forces committed war crimes by purposefully sniping civilian targets.
However, the indiscriminate bloodshed may not have been perpetrated solely by the Bosnian Serb militias, but also by ordinary civilians eager for a thrill.
Wealthy foreigners wanted in on the action – and paid handsomely to live-out their fantasies by travelling to Sarajevo on the weekends to partake in a ‘human safari’, according to claims being investigated by Italian authorities.
In chilling detail, the case alleges that war tourists from Italy, Canada, Russia and the U.S. spent between £70,000 – £88,000 to take part in the ‘manhunt’, even paying extra to kill minors.
While the Italian investigation is new, the rumour of foreigners engaging in bloody murder in Sarajevo has been festering for more than a decade – and now the truth may finally be uncovered.
In 2007, John Jordan, a former U.S. Marine, found himself at The Hague testifying before the United Nations-led ad hoc international criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.
There, the veteran made astonishing claims about his time volunteering as a UN firefighter in Sarajevo – the war-torn capital of Bosnia-Herzegovina – between 1992 and 1995.
The crisis began when the Bosnian Serb forces – agitated by Bosnia-Herzegovina’s decision to break from federal Yugoslavia – besieged the city for 44 months, cutting off food, electricity and setting whole neighbourhoods ablaze by cannon fire and shelling.
Jordan stationed himself in Sarajevo during the longest siege in the history of modern warfare to help civilians, and gave evidence years later about the horrors he witnessed.
The landmark trial led to the sentencing of Bosnian Serb general Dragomir Milosevic to 33 years in jail for murder, inhumane treatment and overseeing a campaign of terror that killed thousands, mainly Muslims.
‘There was no safe place in Sarajevo,’ concluded the presiding judge, Patrick Robinson. ‘One could be killed and injured anywhere and any time.’
At the trial, Jordan testified about a number of atrocities, including the Serb’s indiscriminate targetting of unarmed residents. He himself was shot in the chest while responding to a fire at the city’s frontline, just north of the Bosnian Serb-held area of Grbavica.
He also testified about how Serb shooters seemed to deliberately aim for the youngest in a family, as a way to ’cause the most pain to survivors’.
‘If an adult and child were walking together, the child would be shot. If a family was walking, it would be the youngest. In a crowd of girls, it is seemed that the most attractive would be shot,’ he said in his statement.
But then he made another sinister allegation, yet to be proven in a court of law: that Sarajevo was crawling with ‘shooter tourists’ armed with hunting weapons, who had travelled overseas and paid handsomely to snipe for the Serb side as a bit of weekend fun.
‘I had witnessed on more than one occasion personnel who did not appear to me to be locals by their dress, by the weapons they carried, by the way they were being handled, i.e., guided around by the locals,’ Jordan testified in court.
When asked to elaborate by the judge, he specified how these ‘tourist shooters’ wore a ‘civilian-military’ combination-style dress that made them distinct from the Serb fighters, and carried weapons that were more suited to ‘hunting boar in the Black Forest than urban combat in the Balkans’.
The foreigners also appeared ‘completely unfamiliar’ with the city, Jordan said, and were seen ‘being led, literally almost by the hand, around an area by people who are familiar it’.
The veteran’s testimony ultimately lacked weight, however. He admitted he ‘never actually saw one take a shot’, but insisted seeing the armed foreigners around Grbavica and other neighbourhoods.
But Jordan’s allegations didn’t disappear, and continued to accrue interest and speculation over time.
Though the concept of a ‘human safari’ is almost beyond-belief, it is not incongruent with the level of depravity that was proven to have taken place in Sarajevo, where the main street – Meša Selimović Boulevard – was nicknamed ‘Sniper Alley’ because of the inherent risk of death in traversing it.
And killing for sport has been captured on camera before. Russian nationalist Eduard Limonov was filmed in 1992 firing a machine gun down on the besieged city by Bafta award-winning director Pawel Pawlikowski, for his documentary ‘Serbian Epics’.
Limonov was in the company of Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, who was sentenced to 40 years in jail for genocide at a 2016 trial in The Hague where the documentary clip was shown.
A year later, Ratko Mladic, known as the ‘Butcher of Bosnia’ for leading forces during the massacre of 8,000 Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica, was jailed for life.
The disturbing allegations about tourists partaking in the killing spree in Sarajevo resurfaced dramatically in 2022.
That year, Slovenian director Miran Zupanič released a documentary entitled ‘Sarajevo Safari’, gathering testimony from witnesses who said they saw such activity firsthand.
One of the interviewees was an anonymous Slovenian man, who worked as an intelligence officer for the U.S. during the Balkan Wars and claimed to have visited Bosnia around 35 times between 1992 and 1994.
Describing the types of foreigners who took part in the ‘safari’ – of which he witnessed seven – the former agent said they were from the ‘upper echelons’.
‘These people were certainly not ordinary people. They were people in high positions, protected… people who, after having everything, seek another thrill, saying to themselves: ‘Why shouldn’t I now shoot a child or an adult in Sarajevo and gain another pleasure? I won’t only kill animals,’ he said.
‘I never heard the prices. I only know it was terribly expensive, and that the price was higher for a child,’ he added.
In a lengthy description, the witness recounted how he was invited on one of the safaris and escorted into a military jeep, after being given a bulletproof vest, a helmet and a green uniform as preparation.
‘They told me they would show me the close positions of their soldiers,’ the witness said, but then the jeep stopped in front of a building and he noticed something peculiar about the so-called troops.
‘There I saw three gentlemen whose faces immediately told me they were not from Bosnia, not Serbs, not Montenegrins, they had to be from the West.
‘One of them even looked Russian. I can tell by the face. They were prepared: you could see something was about to happen. I thought they were foreign journalists… Then I connected the dots. These men couldn’t wait to come and do something,’ he said.
He described how from the jeeps, the group was taken into two ‘camouflaged’ rooms where participants – aided by spotters – shot at civilians from rotating positions, including women and children.
‘I was horrified by the safari. It’s the peak of depravity. Such violent, inhumane killing,’ the former intelligence officer said.
He was even asked if he wanted to take part. ‘Are you interested in something adrenaline-filled?’ an official said, an offer he claimed he declined.
‘I had my own binoculars so I could see. After the man fired, the person fell. Most were hit in the chest, because the head is harder. But I also saw a hit to the head. From that I saw they were very good hunters,’ the former agent said, recounting one of the shootings.
The anonymous witness said he was told by the Serbs to ‘never repeat’ the things he saw – incidents he described as the ‘dark side’ of the war.
But the wealthy tourists themselves seemed unfazed and detached from the alleged horror. ‘You fired your trophy shot and went home,’ the former agent said, struck at their nonchalance.
The witness described the foreigners’ supposed route: they flew from Trieste in northeastern Italy to Belgrade, where helicopters transported them to Pale, a Bosnian Serb–controlled town. From there, they were driven to positions near Sarajevo.
Another witness in the documentary was an intelligence officer for the Bosnian army called Edin Subasic, who gathered information about the alleged weekend snipers from a captured Serbian soldier.
‘I analysed the information to the extent possible and wrote a summary, a conclusion that this was a new phenomenon on the Sarajevo battlefield,’ he said.
‘This was about a specific type of enemy, about foreigners who are not real enemies in the war […] but they are a real danger.’
Subasic claimed he discovered the so-called safaris in late 1993 and then passed on the information to Italy’s Sismi military intelligence in early 1994.
A few months later, Sismi responded, confirming reports that ‘safari’ tourists would fly from Trieste and then travel to the hills above Sarajevo to partake in sniping.
‘We’ve put a stop to it and there won’t be any more safaris,’ the officer was told, according to Ansa news agency, and the trips soon stopped.
The documentary immediately stirred controversy, with the director receiving furious backlash.
‘I suffered human and professional disqualifications, which I have never experienced in my life.
‘But I accept them as part of the process. If you reveal such a story, you can also expect negative reactions,’ Zupanič told DW.
But others were horrified by the allegations and demanded action, like the then-mayor of Sarajevo, Benjamina Karic, who filed criminal charges against ‘persons unknown’ who spread death in Sarajevo.
‘It is my duty to react in this way to the facts stated in the documentary film “Sarajevo Safari”,’ she wrote on X, before the investigation apparently stalled.
But an Italian writer and journalist has recently reignited the case, demanding the authorities properly scrutinise exactly want went on when tourists travelled to the war-ravaged Sarajevo in the 1990s.
‘We’re talking about wealthy people, with a reputation, entrepreneurs, who during the siege of Sarajevo paid to be able to kill defenseless civilians,’ Ezio Gavazzeni, who has filed a new legal complaint with Italian magistrates, told La Repubblica.
‘They left Trieste for the manhunt. And then they returned and continued their normal lives, respectable in everyone’s eyes.
‘People with a passion for weapons, to vent, who prefer to go to bed with a rifle, with money at their disposal and the right contacts of facilitators between Italy and Serbia. It’s the indifference of evil: becoming God and remaining unpunished.’
Gavazzeni said he grew up reading press articles suggesting that tourist snipers were stationed in the hills above Sarajevo, where the Serbian army was deployed.
‘It struck me, and I kept it there,’ then Zupanič’s documentary reignited his interest. ‘I’ve pissed off half the world, both Bosnian and Italian sources,’ he said, adding that the Serbs ‘don’t accept’ the allegations.
Prosecutor Alessandro Gobbis has been instructed to track down the Italians who, between 1993 and 1995, allegedly killed unarmed civilians ‘for fun’. The charge is murder, aggravated by cruelty.
Gavazzeni is working with lawyer Nicola Brigida and former judge Guido Salvini, and says he has gathered a number of witnesses who will testify, including former Bosnian agent Subasic, and the Italian officials who were made aware of the allegations back in 1994.
The writer claims he was contacted by an Italian who overheard his then-boss, at work, talking about the manhunt, and he assumes there are at least a hundred more likeminded foreigners who made the same weekend trips.
The writer said the war tourists fit a specific profile: they were wealthy, hailed from a hard-right background, and tended to have a passion for weapons and hunting.
‘Everything was organised,’ he told Ansa. ‘The Bosnian intelligence services believed that the Serbian State Security Service was behind it all.’
Jovica Stanišić, a Serbian official who was convicted for war crimes for his role in plans to ethnically cleanse parts of Bosnia and Croatia from non-Serbs, ‘played a key role in the service,’ he added.
While the investigation is just confined to Italy, Gavazzeni’s bold legal action has galvanised a movement, and more countries will inevitably follow suit in the mission to find out the truth about the alleged ‘human safaris’.
In the wake of the writer’s legal complaint, U.S. congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna said she had opened an investigation into the alleged ‘murder tourism’, writing on X that she is in touch with the Bosnian consulate and the Italian embassy.
‘Paying money to shoot civilians – and even worse to shoot children – is a level of evil our country cannot and will not tolerate,’ she wrote.
‘Both the Italian and Bosnian governments will be sharing any and all information regarding any AMERICANS that may be implicated. If there are any Americans who have engaged in this, they deserve to be charged and prosecuted.’
Ever since Zupanič’s documentary, Serbian war veterans have vehemently rejected the allegations as lies.
