Milan prosecutors seek alleged Italian 'sniper tourists' who paid to shoot Sarajevo civilians

Prosecutors in Milan have opened an investigation into Italian citizens who allegedly paid members of the Bosnian Serb army for trips to Sarajevo so that they could shoot and kill citizens during the four-year siege of the city in the 1990s.

- Angela Giuffrida Rome Kim Willsher Paris

More than 10,000 people were killed in Sarajevo by constant shelling and sniper fire between 1992 and 1996 in what was the longest siege in modern history after Bosnia and Herzegovina declared independence from Yugoslavia.

The snipers were perhaps the most feared element of life under siege in Sarajevo because they would pick off people on the streets, including children, at random, as if playing a video game or partaking in a safari.

Groups of Italians and other nationalities, so-called "sniper tourists", are alleged to have participated in the massacre after paying large sums of money to soldiers belonging to the army of Radovan Karadžić, the former Bosnian Serb leader who in 2016 was found guilty of genocide, to be transported to the hills surrounding Sarajevo so that they could shoot at the population for pleasure.

Sarajevo is in a basin surrounded by mountains, which made cutting it off and attacking it particularly easy.

Milan prosecutors, led by Alessandro Gobbi, launched an investigation aimed at identifying the Italians involved so they can be charged with voluntary murder aggravated by cruelty and abject motives.