The controversy surrounding alleged “human safaris” during the Sarajevo siege has intensified, with new accusations suggesting Serbia’s current president was involved in these grim activities targeting unarmed civilians.

Aleksandar Vučić, who assumed the presidency in 2017, faces claims of participating in disturbing expeditions where affluent foreign tourists allegedly used sniper rifles to shoot at individuals during the prolonged siege of Sarajevo by Bosnian Serb forces in the 1990s.

Between 1992 and 1996, Sarajevo endured the longest siege of a capital city in modern warfare history, resulting in over 10,000 deaths due to shelling and sniper attacks.

Milanese prosecutors have launched an investigation into Italian tourists who purportedly paid between £70,000 and £88,000 to partake in this violence, with even higher fees allegedly charged for targeting children.

Croatian investigative journalist Domagoj Margetic has approached the Milan prosecutor’s office with allegations that Vučić was involved in and supported sniper tourism in Sarajevo, accusations that the Serbian leader has previously denied.

The allegation against the Serbian President has been echoed by Serbian lawyer Čedomir Stojković, who is putting pressure on magistrates in Belgrade to launch an investigation. 

In his letter to prosecutors in Milan, Mr Margetic cites a video from 1993 which he claims showed Mr Vučić carrying a sniper rifle alongside other armed men.

The group, Mr Margetic claims, was stationed at a Jewish cemetery located on a hillside overlooking Sarajevo that was utilised as a frontline position for Serbian snipers.

In his letter, Mr Margetic claims the Serbian President was a ‘war volunteer’ in the besieged city in 1992 and 1993, and a member of the New Sarajevo Chetnik Detachment of the Army of Republika Srpska (VRS), led by commander Slavko Aleksić.

As evidence of this claim, he cites a snippet from a purported interview Mr Vučić did with the Serbian magazine Duga in 1994, where he appears to have said: 

‘When the war in Bosnia began, I went to Serbian Sarajevo and signed up as a volunteer. I was not a member of the party, I simply went. I knew some friends and that’s why I went to defend [the Serbians].’

Mr Vučić goes on to say he spent time at the Jewish cemetery – the same graveyard which supposedly features in the footage of him with armed men.

The journalist also cites evidence given by Vojislav Seselj, the founder of the hard-right Serbian Radical Party, testifying in The Hague during the defence of former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic in 2013.

During his testimony, Mr Seselj said Mr Vučić was part of the military detachment in Sarajevo, according to court summaries published by the SENSE Transitional Justice Centre.

Hague prosecutors during the United Nations-led ad hoc international criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia found that there was ‘ample evidence’ to show that Aleksić commanded a unit of Serbian Radical Party (SRS) volunteers based at the Sarajevo Jewish cemetery from April 1992 until at least September 1993.

In the letter to Milan magistrates, the journalist also cites the claims of Zukan Helez, Bosnia’s minister of defence, who has said that members of the VRS told him they witnessed Mr Vučić firing on Sarajevo residents from the Jewish cemetery.

Mr Vučić has previously denied that he ever shot at anyone in Sarajevo, and that he was working in the Pale, 11 miles east of the city, as a journalist in the early 1990s.

‘I can’t listen to nonsense and lies,’ he said to Bosnian news channel Face TV in 2021.

‘I didn’t shoot, but I was at Pale, doing my job.’

He also claims the object he carried in the video was an umbrella, not a rifle. 

Mr Helez has dismissed the Serbian President’s denials. ‘His excuse that in the footage taken on the frontlines above besieged Sarajevo he was holding an umbrella and not a rifle is a blatant lie,’ he told The Sarajevo Times.

‘Recently, I spoke with three members of the VRS who admitted to me that they were at the Jewish cemetery at the same time as Vučić and that the current President of Serbia was firing on Sarajevo residents with a sniper rifle,’ he said in December last year.

In his letter, Mr Margetic alleges that not only did Mr Vučić participate in the ‘safaris’ personally, he also provided logistical support for the trips, including acting as a translator between the foreign hunters and the Serbian forces.

‘There is more and more evidence that Aleksandar Vucic was part of the “Sniper safari” during the siege of Sarajevo,’ Mr Stojković, a Serbian lawyer wrote on Facebook.

‘Vučić absolutely certainly knew what was going on, and he was a part of it, one way or another.’

‘Despite the increasingly intense evidence – the public prosecutor’s office in Belgrade does not launch an investigation,’ he wrote in another post, condemning Serbian authorities for not probing the allegations.

For over a decade, there have been rumours surrounding wealthy tourists from Italy, the U.S., Canada and Russia travelling to Sarajevo in the 1990s to take part in ‘sniper tourism’.

With the launch of an Italian investigation, triggered by a legal complaint filed by Italian journalist and writer Ezio Gavazzeni, the truth about the so-called ‘human safaris’ might finally be uncovered.

‘We’re talking about wealthy people, with a reputation, entrepreneurs, who during the siege of Sarajevo paid to be able to kill defenseless civilians,’ Mr Gavazzeni 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.’

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. 

Mr Gavazzeni is working with lawyer Nicola Brigida and former judge Guido Salvini, and says he has gathered a number of witnesses who will testify.

One of the first people to go public with the allegations was John Jordan, a former U.S. Marine, who testified to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in 2007.

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.

Mr Jordan stationed himself in Sarajevo during the siege 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, Mr 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,’ Mr 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, Mr 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 Mr 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’.

Mr 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.’

Mr 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.

While the investigation is just confined to Italy, Mr 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 Mr Zupanič’s documentary, Serbian war veterans have vehemently rejected the allegations as lies. 

The Daily Mail contacted the President’s Office in Serbia for comment.