Share and Follow
Peering through his telescopic sights, he could be mistaken for just another sniper from the Bosnian Serb army, occupying deserted apartments with a view over the besieged streets of Sarajevo.
Yet, to a U.S. intelligence officer who had cleverly infiltrated their ranks, something about this cold-blooded shooter stood out as peculiar.
Unlike the typical military attire, he donned green hunting gear, and his rifle was neither a Serb-made Zastava semi-automatic nor a Kalashnikov, the standard issue for sharpshooters during the Bosnian War.
The secret operative, a Slovenian posing under the alias Piskotek, noted with his trained eye that the sniper’s refined facial features, costly equipment, and a certain ‘arrogant’ air suggested he was an Englishman from a privileged background.
This suspicion solidified into almost certainty when he overheard the man speaking in precise tones to the soldiers who had accompanied him to the front line.
It was the winter of 1993-94, and the daily barrage of sniper fire and shells that would, by the end of the 44-month siege, claim more than 5,000 civilian lives, including those of 1,601 children, was well under way.
By then, the estimated 400,000 Sarajevo residents trapped in a city whose steep encircling hills turned it into a shooting gallery had refined their tactics for traversing the most exposed streets. They would zigzag as they ran down them and duck behind walls and cars.
For some, however, there was no hiding place, and eventually the ‘English’ interloper squeezed the trigger. Through his binoculars, Piskotek says, he saw the male victim, a few hundred yards distant, drop to the ground.
Bosnian Serb wartime leader, Radovan Karadzic, walks accompanied by bodyguards
Senada Dodik’s son Damir, 17, was killed by sniper fire during the Siege of Sarajevo, Sarajevo, Bosnia
It was not the first time he’d witnessed a kill at close quarters. After winning the trust of the Bosnian Serb high command, he claims they permitted him to inspect their front-line operations in Sarajevo on about 35 occasions between 1992 and 1994, perhaps to show off their stranglehold.
During that time, he says he saw ‘eight or nine’ foreign interlopers being permitted to shoot at men, women and children struggling to carry on with life in conditions that a war crimes judge later described as ‘medieval’.
Besides the Briton, there was a Canadian, a Russian, an American and several Italians. They were not there because they believed in the Bosnian Serb cause. Indeed, they evidently had no interest in the rights or wrongs of the war.
Nor were they mercenaries. On the contrary, they appeared to be wealthy and influential hunting and shooting enthusiasts who had paid huge sums to experience the ‘adrenalin rush’ of stalking and killing another human being.
When the story of these so-called ‘Sarajevo Safaris’ was revealed by the Italian investigative writer Ezio Gavazzeni, a few days ago, it sent waves of revulsion around the world. As for me, I suspected it to be the sickest form of fake news.
Having reported on the nightmares of Srebrenica, where Bosnian Serb soldiers separated 8,372 Muslim men from their families and marched them to the slaughter, I had glimpsed the unbounded barbarity of this Balkans war.
Yet the notion that anyone might shoot a stranger for ‘sport’ defied comprehension. Astonishingly, however, there is evidence that this most ghastly of wartime atrocities really happened.
And after listening to the Slovenian ‘Piskotek’ (who is now 61 and retired but says he still fears being murdered because he saw too much) and other convincing witnesses in Sarajevo, I’m starting to believe the unthinkable.
Gavazzeni, a respected chronicler of Mafia crimes, has no doubts. His two-year investigation was prompted by a harrowing Croatian-made documentary called Sarajevo Safari, released in 2022 but not widely screened.
Though it caused brief outrage after being premiered at a film festival in Bosnia, it was ignored by the authorities perhaps because they feared probing its allegations would heighten residual tension between the Serbs and Muslims.
Pictured: Edin Subasic, a former intelligence officer in the Bosnian and Herzegovina army
No sniper, military or otherwise, has ever been identified or called to account for murders committed during the siege. However, the film prompted the former mayor of Sarajevo, Benjamina Karic, to file a criminal case against the safari’s as-yet unidentified perpetrators.
And this week’s revelations have shamed Bosnia’s state prosecutor into approaching potential witnesses with a view to starting a formal investigation.
Yesterday it also emerged that Alessandro Gobbis, a Milan public prosecutor, will start taking witness statements next week – with the current president of Serbia Aleksandar Vucic a suspect.
Now 55, Vucic, served in the Republika Srpska Army as a volunteer and a Croatian journalist claims to have evidence that he was stationed at one the posts where the ‘safaris’ happened, a hillside Jewish cemetery with bird’s eye views of the city.
The president is even alleged to have joined in the shooting of civilians, and an archive video appears to show him carrying a sniper’s rifle. Vucic denies involvement, claiming the object he held in the video was an umbrella.
The Italian writer’s files have also sparked action in Washington, where Republican congresswoman Anna Paulinaa Luna has pledged to track down any Americans who took part, and Milan, where prosecutors have started a criminal case.
Gravezzeni tells me he has hard evidence that ‘hundreds’ of foreigners took part in these evil safaris during the siege, and that he has unmasked some of them.
He declined to disclose them to me, but they are reported to include an Italian owner of a medical company, a banker, and a car executive. ‘They will not be resting easily in their beds,’ he says.
He also proposes to expose the hunt organisers, who flew clients into Belgrade – sometimes allegedly using the defunct, Serb-owned private air travel company Aviogenex, which operated flights between the Serbian capital and the Italian port city of Trieste during the war – then bussed them to sniper dens around Sarajevo.
The writer claims safari-goers dispatched their victims as dispassionately as big game hunters on the African plains and paid up to £200,000 for a weekend ‘shoot’.
Yet his most staggering assertion – corroborated by the Slovenian spy and other witnesses I have spoken to – is that hunters were given a list on which their targets were priced, like the Big Five animals on a conventional safari.
Perhaps because it was often difficult to fix the children of Sarajevo in their sights, as they scampered to school or ran errands, they were deemed the most prized trophies, so for shooting them organisers demanded the most money.
In a bid to understand the mindset of people who would eliminate small boys and girls without compunction, Gavazzeni spoke to a criminal psychologist.
Senada Dodik with her son Damir, 17, who was killed by sniper fire during the Siege of Sarajevo
‘The conclusion was that these were privileged people who had everything they needed in life and craved a new form of excitement,’ he says. ‘They wanted to feel the power of killing another human being, knowing they could get away with it and return to their ordinary lives. For them, that was the ultimate thrill.’
For people who lived through the siege, the longest and most ruthless of modern times, allegations that outsiders joined in the massacre of innocents – the purpose of which was to destroy morale and hasten the Bosniak army’s surrender – are not new.
In 1992, the ultra-nationalist Russian writer and politician Eduard Limonov accepted the invitation of Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic to fire a machine-gun on the city below them. Limonov was said to have paid for this ‘privilege’, which was captured on film.
Towards the end of the war, newspapers in Croatia and Italy also reported the claimed presence of ‘weekend warriors’.
More proof emerged in 2007, at the war crimes tribunal of Republika Srpska army chief Ratko Mladic. Former U.S Marine John Jordan, who was wounded by a sniper while running a volunteer firefighting service in Sarajevo, testified that ‘tourist shooters’ had paid to snipe with the Serbs.
‘I had witnessed on more than one occasion personnel who did not appear to be locals by their dress, by the weapons they carried, by the way they were being handled,’ he told the hearing.
‘When a guy shows up with a weapon that looks more like he ought to be hunting boar in the Black Forest than in urban combat in the Balkans [and] you can obviously tell he is a novice at moving around rubble, you know.
‘If it walks like a duck, talks like a duck, it’s a duck.’ If Jordan’s recollections were based on assumptions, Edin Subasic, who served as an analytics officer with the Bosnia and Herzegovina Army’s intelligence service, presented me with evidence which he documented and believes to be gathering dust in a military archive.
In November 1993, he says, he was asked to assess the evidence of an interrogated enemy soldier: a 20-year-old rookie who had been captured a day or two after arriving in Sarajevo and wandering into the defenders’ territory. The young prisoner said he’d travelled through the night from Belgrade on an army bus, which had stopped along the way so that five Italians could board.
They had arrived at the rendezvous point in ‘limousines’, dressed in ‘high quality hunting clothes’ and were accompanied by military police.
On the bus they drank heavily and seemed in a party mood. Seeking to compare their rate of pay with his own low wage, the rookie struck up a conversation with them using broken English and Serbian.
Three of them cheerfully admitted that they were on ‘a safari for humans’ and had handed over large sums for the opportunity to shoot at the defending Bosniaks.
Fearing he had uncovered ‘a new phenomenon in the Sarajevo battlefields that endangered civilian lives’, Subasic sought to verify the captive’s claims by talking to front-line soldiers.
When that failed, he raised his concerns with General Mustafa Hajrulahovic, commander of Sarajevo’s defence force.
He met bosses of SIMSI, the Italian intelligence service, with whom he had good relations.
Several months later, the Italians assured the general they had ‘neutralised the source’ of the safaris, and they would not happen again. Subasic took this to mean they’d found the organisers and possibly arrested them. And there the matter ended.
Today, however, the rage and shame he felt on learning that rich men regarded Bosnians as ‘animals to be hunted for amusement’ still burns in the eyes of the 62-year-old.
Despite the obvious risks, he is ready to give evidence in any future trial and says a new eyewitness, who worked for a Sarajevo aid agency during the war, has already contacted him.
Another who is prepared to testify is, Mirza Ustamujic, chief executive of the Sarajevo-based engineering and power company Energoinvest, who posted his evidence on Facebook.
In October 1994, when he was 13, he and two friends were wounded in the legs by sniper fire – an atrocity that was videoed and later shown at the trial of wartime Serb leader Slobodan Milosevic.
What the judges were not told, he says, is that a few days before this shooting, Bosniak soldiers fighting close to enemy lines had found a batch of the safari price lists. They handed them to his father, who designed trenches for the defending army, and he brought them home.
‘They were printed in black letters on small squares of brown paper,’ Ustamujic told me, tearing off a Post-it tab to show the size. ‘The prices were given in German marks, and they offered a choice of weapon.’
At the time it was assumed that these flyers had been scattered around the streets by the Bosnian Serbs in a ‘monstrous psychological trick’, he says. But ‘after everything that is coming to light today – documentaries, investigations, testimonies – I ask myself: was it the plain truth?’
This question will torment the many thousands of families who lost loved ones in the siege.
The Emperor’s Mosque in Sarajevo, where many Bosnian Serb army snipers laid in abandoned apartments overlooking the besieged city
At a Sarajevo memory centre where bereaved parents comfort one another amid a moving display of childhood mementoes –scuffed trainers, old toys, a battered violin – I met Senada Dodik.
Now a grief-worn woman of 67, she showed me photos of herself as a young mother enjoying joyful times with her late husband Dragan, and their son Damir, and daughter, Daniela.
She laid these pictures on a table juxtaposed with images of Damir, aged 17, lying beside his blue bike on a city centre road. Kneeling beside him were four blue-helmeted UN medics.
While cycling to a friend’s house, that Sunday in June 1995, he had been executed with a single bullet through his heart. It was pierced so unerringly, Senada remarks bleakly, that there wasn’t a drop of blood on the tarmac.
She and Damir had a ‘special bond’, she says, recalling how he had managed to find some red roses amid the dust and rubble and made a bouquet of them for her birthday, three weeks before he was killed.
Since the war she has striven to find the man who fired the bullet. ‘I just wanted to look him in the eye, maybe even smoke a cigarette with him, and ask him why?’ she says.
Her quest has been fruitless, however. Murders such as this were then so commonplace, that there were no inquests or investigations. The killer has melted into the shadows.
Before our meeting, Senada had not heard this week’s revelations about the safari, and when, very gently, I tell her why I have come to Sarajevo, she falls silent and fixes me with a look I shan’t forget. I took it to register an amalgam of unsayable emotions, perhaps including shock, disgust, revulsion and contempt.
‘I can’t think that this could have been done for fun,’ she whispers eventually, gazing at those last pictures of Damir. ‘To look at a child through rifle sights and just kill them. My brain can’t accept that. It’s not human.’
It is not. Yet it seems increasingly likely that for four shameful years, under the watchful eye of Western intelligence agencies in the supposedly civilised heart of Europe, this unique form of depravity was allowed to go on.