Serbian leader denies involvement in Sarajevo ‘human safari’ sniper trips as macabre

The Serbian president has denied any involvement with the ‘human safari’ sniper trips during the Balkan wars of the 1990s, when wealthy tourists allegedly paid to shoot at unarmed civilians in the besieged city of Sarajevo. 

Aleksandar Vučić was responding to allegations by Croatian investigative journalist Domagoj Margetic, who filed a complaint with Milan prosecutors against the Serbian leader over involvement in the alleged human hunting expeditions. 

Mr Margetic accused the politician not only organising, but personally participating in the sniping of civilians during group ‘safari’ trips between 1992 and 1993, when he volunteered for a Bosnian Serb militia which commandeered a Jewish cemetery above Sarajevo. 

The president’s denial came as a macabre video resurfaced of a car allegedly used by the militia’s leader, Slavko Aleksic, featuring a human skull on the bonnet – said to be extracted from a Bosnian corpse – wearing a UN helmet. 

Prosecutors in Milan recently opened an investigation into Italian tourists who allegedly paid up to £88,000 to take part in the sniping of civilians during the four-year Bosnian Serb siege of the city, which left more than 11,500 people dead between 1992-96.

The investigation followed a 2022 documentary called ‘Sarajevo Safari’ directed by Miran Zupanič, which made the claim that elite gun enthusiasts from Russia, Canada and the U.S. made weekend trips to the hills of Sarajevo to shoot at innocent civilians for fun, paying more to target children. 

‘I have informed the Public Prosecutor’s Office in Milan in a report of all my knowledge about Aleksandar Vučić’s connection with human safaris in wartime Sarajevo,’  Mr Margetic announced to his followers on social media.

He claimed to have ‘video materials, photo documentation, audio and video documentation’ proving that Mr Vučić, 55, took part in the expeditions in his 20s, before his rise to political power.

Denying the allegations, Mr Vučić’s spokeswoman Suzana Vasiljevic dismissed them as ‘a textbook case of malicious disinformation, purpose-built to erode the institutional credibility of the Republic of Serbia and its president’.

‘This narrative is devoid of factual grounding and is operationally crafted to generate reputational damage,’ she said in comments published by The Times.

She insisted Mr Vučić was working as a journalist and as a translator in the early 1990s in the nearby Pale, ‘without any contact with military structures or operational activities’. 

She added: ‘President Vučić’s did not participate in combat activities, did not use weapons, and had no role in any wartime operations.’ 

Mr Margetic, however, claimed he had evidence that the Serbian president was a ‘war volunteer’ for the New Sarajevo Chetnik Detachment of the Army of Republika Srpska (VRS), led by commander Aleksić.

That particular detachment was stationed at a Jewish cemetery in Sarajevo, repurposed during the siege as a frontline position for Serbian snipers.

Backing up his claim that the president was part of the militia, the journalist cites a 1994 magazine interview during which Mr Vučić says he ‘signed up as a volunteer’ during the siege, and spent time at the cemetery in the hills above the city. 

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

Bosnian media has previously reported that Mr Vučić claimed he was holding an umbrella, not a weapon in the clip.

Refuting the latest allegations, spokeswoman Vasiljevic claimed it was a tripod he used as a journalist.

Allegations against Mr Vučić have been made previously by Zukan Helez, Bosnia’s minister of defence, who has said that members of the Bosnian Serb Army told him they witnessed Mr Vučić firing on Sarajevo residents from the Jewish cemetery.

‘Recently, I spoke with three members of the Army of Republika Srpska 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 told The Sarajevo Times in an interview last year.

Mr Margetic also claimed that Mr Aleksic alleged in 2017 that the president was formerly a member of his military unit, and provided translation for when foreigners arrived at the cemetery in the 1990s.

Mr Vučić, who took office in 2017, has previously denied that he ever shot at anyone in Sarajevo and insisted he was only in the region as a reporter. He described the allegations as political manipulation.

‘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 added.

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. 

More evidence emerged on Thursday to support the allegation that wealthy tourists paid to fly from Trieste in northeast Italy to join the Serb snipers shoot at civilians in the besieged Sarajevo.

 

Michael Giffoni, an Italian diplomat based in Sarajevo in the 1990s, told La Repubblica that he was alerted to the safaris when he arrived in the city.

‘There were loads of rich people arriving from all over. Hunters, but also businessmen. Military or paramilitary forces, who were strong in that conflict, took them to the hills and they paid. Then everything became clearer,’ he said.

He added that Bosnian intelligence official Edin Subasi – one of Mr Gavazzeni’s key witnesses – received information about the activities of the tourists from a captured Serbian paramilitary, who confessed that Italians and Russians were being driven to Sarajevo to shoot.

Mr Giffoni said the claims were passed on to the Italian secret service in Rome, which responded in a few months time to say that ‘the trail had been explored, they had identified the organisers, and that the matter had been closed’. 

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.

The disturbing allegations about tourists partaking in the killing spree in Sarajevo resurfaced dramatically in 2022.

That year, Slovenian director Mr Zupanič released ‘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.

Another witness in the documentary was Mr Subasic, the agent for the Bosnian army who reported the alleged ‘human safaris’ to Italy’s Sismi military intelligence in early 1994.