Sarajevo: Did "Sniper Safaris" Really Exist?

The report opens on "Sniper Alley." This grim nickname refers to Sarajevo's main thoroughfare, a wide avenue that offers almost no cover from gunfire. Residents risked their lives there to fetch water or food. Positioned on nearby buildings and hills, the besiegers fired at random on civilians.

From 1992 to 1995, Bosnian Serb forces besieged the city. After the collapse of Yugoslavia, their army was determined at all costs to prevent the creation of an independent republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The question the report asks is precise: did this army also allow tourists to go manhunting from its firing positions?

According to the report, the first mention of sniper tourists dates back to 1995. The city was still under siege when a press article mentioned these foreign shooters. Yet the journalists in Sarajevo were among the most experienced in the world, and none of them picked up the story. The report highlights this silence as a first troubling element.

The affair only resurfaced in 2022, with the documentary Sarajevo Safari.

Edin Subašić is one of the film's key witnesses. He was a member of the Bosnian military intelligence service during the war. According to him, a Serb prisoner of war allegedly stated that he had escorted five foreigners to the sniper positions. The report considers this testimony significant, but it is secondhand, and its content passed through several translations.

A second witness, who wishes to remain anonymous, claims to have seen these sniper tourists himself. He says that at the time he infiltrated Bosnian Serb positions by posing as a journalist. One night, he allegedly watched nine foreigners in hunting gear shooting.

However, the documentary provides no evidence for these claims. BIRN later investigated the matter. Several years later, its journalists tracked down this anonymous witness in Slovenia, but they were unable to verify his account. An investigation was also opened in Sarajevo when the film was released. It led nowhere.

The affair then took on a new dimension, with new investigations but also new inconsistencies. In February 2026, the book The Weekend Snipers by Italian author Ezio Gavazzeni caused a sensation. A few months earlier, the author had handed his sources over to the Milan prosecutor's office, which opened a judicial investigation.

The book makes several accusations:

• extra fees were allegedly paid to shoot children and pregnant women;
• half of the sniper tourists were allegedly Italian.

BIRN journalists also examined these accusations, and they found inconsistencies. Most of the testimonies cited in the book are anonymous or secondhand. Only two witnesses are named. Both say they had access to intelligence information, but their statements contradict each other, and the book does not point this out.

BIRN also interviewed former military officials from both sides, as well as a CIA agent. All of them say they never heard of human safaris. They also doubt that several hundred tourists could have been taken to the front line without attracting attention.

The report then raises the question of the witnesses' reliability, without answering it definitively.

According to the report, these rumors resonate with the trauma of the city's residents. During the siege, more than 11,000 civilians were killed in Sarajevo, around 350 of them by snipers. From the hills, Sniper Alley is within rifle range. The Jewish cemetery, for example, was once a firing position.

It is there that the team meets tour guide Nermin Kahriman, who has been telling this story for several years. His father was one of the Bosnian soldiers who defended the city. He rarely spoke about the war, which is why Nermin wanted to learn more.

The report recalls an important point: during the siege, the presence of foreigners at Bosnian Serb positions was nothing unusual. It is firmly established that some snipers were mercenaries, "weekend soldiers" who came from abroad.

This is the point emphasized by researcher Jovana Kolarić, a war crimes expert, whom the team meets at the History Museum of Sarajevo. According to her, foreigners did kill civilians, but they may have been people paid to shoot, rather than tourists paying to do so.

She says that in fourteen years of research, she has never found the slightest evidence that sniper tourists existed. Among the 4,700 testimonies collected by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, she found only one that refers, in vague terms, to this kind of shooter from abroad.

For Jovana Kolarić, the current debate diverts attention from the real issue: prosecuting the snipers whose crimes are historically established. The report notes that to date, no sniper from the Bosnian Serb army has been criminally prosecuted for the killings committed in Sarajevo. Media attention has instead focused on safari stories that have never been firmly proven.

The report concludes that the story of human safaris shocks people and generates enormous media interest, but that the evidence it rests on is fragile when examined closely.

Ongoing investigations, notably in Austria and Belgium, will have to determine whether these suspicions are based on new evidence. The report points out that the accusations are serious and that, in Sarajevo, they reopen wounds that have never fully healed.