A US congresswoman has promised to track down rich Americans accused of paying huge sums of money to shoot at civilians during the siege of Sarajevo in the 1990s.
Public prosecutors in Milan are looking into allegations that far-right extremists and gun enthusiasts from Italy, the US and Russia travelled to Serbia to take part in “war tourism”, where they paid Serbian forces to let them fire at residents in the city.
Foreigners would allegedly pay between the equivalent of €80,000 and €100,000 (£71,000 and £88,000) to engage in the shooting. They were given a “price list” for various rates, depending on the target, La Repubblica reported.
“Regarding the alleged ‘murder tourism’ discussed below, I have opened an investigation into this matter and am in contact with the Bosnian consulate as well as the Italian embassy,” congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna, who sits on the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, wrote on X.
“Paying money to shoot civilians – and even worse to shoot children – is a level of evil our country cannot and will not tolerate.
“If there are any Americans who have engaged in this, they deserve to be charged and prosecuted.”
Ms Luna, an ally of Donald Trump who last month nominated the US president for the Nobel Peace Prize, added that the Italian and Bosnian governments will be sharing “any and all information regarding any AMERICANS that may be implicated”.
The siege of Sarajevo took place between 1992 and 1996, and was the longest in modern European history, with more than 11,500 people killed.
Witnesses to the “war tourism” trips in Italy say they were arranged from the northeastern city of Trieste. Participants would be positioned in sniper positions overlooking Sarajevo by Bosnian Serb militias loyal to Radovan Karadzic, the Serb former politician who led Republika Srpska. He was later convicted of genocide and crimes against humanity.
Investigators believe Serbian intelligence services were aware of, or involved in, the operation, but Serbia has denied any role in the alleged killings.
Benjamina Karic, a former mayor of Sarajevo, told Italy’s ANSA news agency that an “entire team of tireless people are fighting to have this complaint heard”.
Journalist Ezio Gavazzeni, who launched the case, told La Repubblica: “[There was] a price tag for these killings: children cost more, then men, preferably in uniform and armed, [then] women, and finally old people, who could be killed for free.
“They departed Trieste for a manhunt. And then they came home and continued their normal lives. They were respectable in the opinion of those who knew them.”
Italian investigators are working to identify any Italians who took part, in order to charge them with “voluntary homicide aggravated by cruelty and abject motives”.
A former US marine, John Jordan, previously testified to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in 2007 that “tourist shooters” came to Sarajevo “to take pot shots at civilians for their own gratification”.
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