A complaint filed by the writer Ezio Gavazzeni and the lawyers Nicola Brigida y Guido Salvini This Monday led to the opening of a legal case in the Italian courts on the so-called ‘death safaris’, leisure trips to Sarajevo besieged by Bosnian Serb artillery in the early 1990s that dozens of transalpine citizens undertook to shoot at the defenseless civilian population.
“The documentation includes the evidence that has allowed this investigation to be opened and reveals that Italian citizens traveled to Sarajevo, passing through Trieste, to kill besieged people,” says Brigida in statements collected by Efe. The lawyer clarifies that the complaint does not raise the names of specific citizens, but rather focuses on exposing those trips with documents that allegedly prove their organization or testimonies from soldiers or intelligence services.
The Milan Prosecutor’s Office will try to find out who made these kinds of macabre trips, which cost between 80,000 and 100,000 euros, according to the initial hypothesis of the investigation. At the moment, the identity of the Italian “war tourists” has not been revealed, although Brigida emphasizes that the 17 pages that contain the complaint include “elements that could allow the identification of the people who committed these monstrous crimes.”
The Milanese prosecutor Alessandro Gobbiswhich is investigating the case, will analyze the thesis of the complainants, who maintain that, during the 47 months that the siege lasted, dozens of Italians decided to position themselves as snipers in the hills surrounding Sarajevo to open fire on civilians. The only goal was to have a good time.
“We are talking about people who traveled to kill people on weekends. Talking about ‘death safaris’ gives chills,” laments Brigida. The complainants have outlined the profile of these “tourists.” They are sympathizers—or political leaders—of the extreme right who are fanatical about weapons.
The first witness whose testimony Prosecutor Gobbis will hear is that of a former Bosnian secret agent, who lived and heard those events during a massacre where a total of 11,541 civilians died, including 1,601 children. The crime being considered by the court is multiple homicide with the aggravating circumstances of “abject motives” and “cruelty” so that the facts do not prescribe.
It is not the first time that the ‘hunting of civilians’ in Sarajevo by wealthy foreign citizens has reached court. Highlights the example of the documentary Sarajevo Safari (2022) by the Slovenian director Miran Zupanicwhich shows without revealing their identities how these ‘hunters’ not only came from Italy; also from other countries such as the United States or Russia.
In fact, Zupanič himself is likely to testify at the Milan court. Already in November 2022, the Bosnia-Herzegovina Prosecutor’s Office opened to analyze the information about this film after a complaint filed by Benjamina Karićthen mayor of Sarajevo.
The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia sentenced Bosnian Serb political and military leaders to life imprisonment, Radovan Karadzic y Ratko Mladicfor war crimes such as the siege of Sarajevo, where some 6,000 civilians were murdered.