According to local media, Italian prosecutors are looking into the possibility that Italian snipers paid the Bosnian Serb army to shoot people for fun during the siege of Sarajevo in the 1990s.
The inquiry for voluntary manslaughter launched by Milan prosecutor Alessandro Gobbis aims to find Italians who may have "paid to play war and kill defenceless civilians 'for fun.'" between 1993 and 1995, according to La Repubblica daily.
The publication claimed that the unnamed suspects it called "war tourists" were primarily well-off, gun-loving right-wing supporters who left Trieste, in northern Italy, and were transported to the hills around Sarajevo.

According to the daily Il Giornale, which was the first to reveal in July that an investigation had been initiated in Italy, the would-be snipers paid Bosnian Serb soldiers up to 100,000 euros a day to shoot at civilians below them.
The probe comes when Italian writer and journalist Ezio Gavanezzi filed a complaint after Benjamina Karic, the former mayor of Sarajevo, called him in August 2025.
Following the release of the documentary "Sarajevo Safari" by Slovenian filmmaker Miran Zupanic, which exposed the crimes, she filed her own lawsuit in Bosnia in 2022.

Gavanezzi reported that at least 100 Italians took part in an interview with La Repubblica; Il Giornale cited at least twice that many, in addition to foreigners from other nations.
Karic expressed her approval of the Italian inquiry on social media on Tuesday.
According to Karic's 2022 complaint, which she shared on social media, the documentary and witness accounts raise "reasonable suspicion" that Bosnian Serb army soldiers "organized 'excursions' for wealthy foreigners."
The soldiers "had the opportunity to fire precision rifles from (army) positions above the city of Sarajevo, killing and wounding innocent civilians in the besieged city, including children," according to the lawsuit.

According to official numbers, Bosnian Serb forces killed about 11,541 men, women, and children and injured over 50,000 during the nearly four-year siege of Sarajevo that started in April 1992—the longest in the history of modern warfare.