Italy Investigates Tourists Over Bosnian War Shooting Claims
Civilians risked their lives to cross Sarajevo's main road during the Bosnian War.
The Milan public prosecutor's office has launched an investigation into claims that Italian citizens went on a "sniper safari" to Bosnia during the war in the early 1990s.
Italian citizens and others are accused of paying large sums of money to shoot at civilians risking their lives to cross the city's main road.
The complaint in Milan was filed by journalist and novelist Ezio Gavazzeni, who described a "human hunt" by "very wealthy people" with weapons who "paid to kill defenseless civilians" from Serb bases in the hills surrounding Sarajevo.
According to some reports, different rates were charged for killing men, women, or children.
More than 11,000 people were killed during the brutal four-year siege of Sarajevo.
Yugoslavia was torn apart by war, and the city was surrounded by Serb forces and subjected to constant shelling and sniper attacks.
Similar allegations about "human hunters" have been made several times from abroad over the years, but the evidence collected by Gavazzeni, including testimony from a Bosnian military intelligence officer, is now being investigated by Italian anti-terrorism prosecutor Alessandro Gobbis.
The allegation is murder.
The Bosnian officer apparently revealed that his Bosnian colleagues learned about the so-called safari in late 1993 and then passed the information to Italy's Sismi military intelligence agency in early 1994.
Sismi's response came a few months later. They learned that the "safari" tourists would fly from the northern Italian border city of Trieste and then travel to the hills above Sarajevo.
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