Sarajevo Safari: When Killing Civilians Became a Weekend Hobby
The Price List That Priced a Child’s Life Highest
On weekends during the siege of Sarajevo, something changed. Survivors noticed it without being able to explain it. The snipers who pinned them behind concrete barriers and dashed hopes of crossing open intersections became, on Saturdays and Sundays, somehow worse. More erratic. More eager. Dzemil Hodzic, who was nine years old when the siege began in 1992, would later recall that weekends were “especially dangerous.” At the time, no one in the besieged city could have guessed why.
Three decades later, an Italian investigation is providing a grotesque answer. According to Milan prosecutor Alessandro Gobbis, wealthy Europeans—Italians, French, Belgians, Swiss, and others—allegedly gathered on Fridays in Trieste, boarded flights to Belgrade on the Serbian Aviogenex airline, and were driven overland to Bosnian Serb military positions overlooking Sarajevo. There, for sums reportedly reaching 100,000 euros adjusted for inflation, they were handed rifles and given a price list. A child was the most expensive target. Then came women, men, and the elderly—who, according to one testimony, could be killed free of charge.
Thirty Years of Silence, Then a Documentary
The allegations were not entirely unknown. In 2007, former US Marine John Jordan (1960– ) testified before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia during the trial of General Dragomir Milošević that he had observed individuals on Bosnian Serb positions in the Grbavica neighborhood who “did not act like locals” and fit the profile of what he called “tourist shooters.” His testimony was filed. It gathered dust. The machinery of international justice, so meticulous in documenting the siege’s 13,952 dead—including 5,434 civilians—somehow failed to pursue the thread he offered.
It took a Slovenian filmmaker to pull it into the open. Miran Zupanič (1961– ), a director who had documented the Bosnian conflict since 1993, released Sarajevo Safari in September 2022. The documentary assembled testimonies from an anonymous former intelligence agent, former soldiers, and contractors who described an organized system: helicopter transfers from Pale, sniper positions in Grbavica with direct sightlines into civilian neighborhoods, groups arriving from the United States, Canada, Russia, and Italy. Zupanič described his initial reaction to the story as disbelief—“I could not believe that so much evil exists.”
The film detonated across the Balkans. Officials from Republika Srpska, including Milorad Dodik, denounced it as “propaganda” and “heinous lies.” The mayor of Istočno Sarajevo filed criminal charges against Zupanič personally. Sarajevo’s mayor, Benjamina Karić, filed a criminal complaint with the Bosnian Prosecutor’s Office, which opened a case in November 2022. By 2025, that investigation had effectively stalled.
Evil as Leisure: The Structure of a “Human Safari”
What makes the Sarajevo Safari allegations so philosophically unbearable is not merely their cruelty but their structure. This was not the chaos of battlefield atrocity. It was commerce. It had logistics: departure points, airline bookings, overland transfers, military escorts. It had pricing: a graduated tariff based on the perceived vulnerability of the target. It had customers: wealthy professionals—lawyers, doctors, a plastic surgeon from Milan, possibly a well-known businessman who “still occasionally appears on television,” according to a witness cited in Italian journalist Ezio Gavazzeni’s 2026 book I cecchini del weekend (The Weekend Snipers). It even had souvenirs: spent cartridges marked with colors—blue or pink for boys or girls, red for men.
Gavazzeni, who filed a 17-page criminal complaint with Milan prosecutors in January 2025, describes the participants as people “with a passion for weapons, money at their disposal, and the right contacts.” He calls it “the indifference of evil: becoming God and remaining unpunished.” The profile he constructs is consistent across testimonies: far-right ideology, connections to hunting and firearms circles, the financial means to treat murder as recreation.
By March 2026, three suspects had been formally registered. The first, an 80-year-old former truck driver from Friuli, had his home searched by Carabinieri. He told reporters he went to Bosnia “for work, not to hunt.” The second is a hunter from central Italy. The third, a businessman from Lombardy. Prosecutors identified them largely because they had boasted about their participation at social gatherings—a detail that reveals something perhaps more disturbing than the crime itself: the absence of shame.
When the Other Becomes Prey
The philosopher Emmanuel Levinas (1906–1995) argued that the human face constitutes an ethical demand that precedes all thought. To look upon another’s face is to encounter a command: you shall not kill. The Sarajevo Safari represents the precise inversion of this principle. The sniper scope does not reveal a face. It reveals a target—abstracted, distant, reduced to a price. The graduated tariff is the mechanism by which the ethical encounter is annihilated. A child costs more not because their life is valued more highly but because killing a child delivers a greater thrill to those for whom vulnerability itself has become the commodity.
This is not simply war. War, for all its horror, operates within a recognizable grammar of political conflict. What the Milan investigation describes is something else entirely: the commodification of killing as experience, the transformation of another human being’s death into a consumable event. The “weekend sniper” returned to his clinic or his office on Monday, resuming a life “respectable in everyone’s eyes,” as Gavazzeni puts it. The siege of Sarajevo was, for 380,000 trapped residents, an unrelenting confrontation with death. For these visitors, it was a package tour.
Justice Deferred Is Complicity Sustained
The most corrosive dimension of this story is not the alleged crime but the decades of institutional paralysis that followed. Jordan testified in 2007. The documentary aired in 2022. The Bosnian investigation stalled. Only when an Italian journalist compiled evidence and filed a complaint in Milan did any state apparatus begin to move—thirty years after the siege ended. Hodzic, the survivor, captured this bitter reality: “We will never know if my brother was killed by one of those who paid to do so.”
The delay was not accidental. It was structural. Republika Srpska’s political establishment had every incentive to suppress the claims. The international community, having already processed the Bosnian War through the ICTY framework, had little appetite for a new category of atrocity that implicated its own citizens. And the perpetrators, shielded by wealth, nationality, and the passage of time, aged comfortably into retirement while the survivors aged into grief.
The Demand That Will Not Be Silenced
The investigation now underway in Milan is fragile. The evidence is largely testimonial. Thirty years have eroded memories, destroyed documents, and killed witnesses. The Bosnian Prosecutor’s Office, prodded by Italy’s action, reopened its own investigation in February 2026, but its track record inspires little confidence. Republika Srpska’s leadership continues to deny everything.
And yet, the story refuses to disappear. Gavazzeni’s book has surfaced new witnesses, new details, new names. Michael Giffoni, Italy’s former second-in-command at the diplomatic mission in Sarajevo during the war, confirmed in November 2025 that the “human safaris” existed. Former Bosnian intelligence officer Edin Subašić, who claims to have reported the trips to Italian intelligence in 1994, remains willing to testify. The survivors of Sarajevo—those who sprinted across Sniper Alley, who buried children pulled from playgrounds—are watching.
Some crimes are so monstrous that they test the very capacity of justice to respond. The Sarajevo Safari is one of them. If wealthy men truly paid to kill children for sport while a city starved and bled, then every year of silence was not merely a failure of law—it was a continuation of the crime by other means. The courtrooms in Milan and Sarajevo now carry a burden that exceeds any single verdict. They must demonstrate that no amount of money, no passage of time, and no political convenience can purchase impunity for the commodification of human life.
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