Milan prosecutors open investigation into Sarajevo's 'human safaris'

mpr21
21 November, 2025 

 Last week, the Milan prosecutor's office opened an investigation into the "human safaris" for millionaires organized during the Balkan War. These were veritable tourist excursions for amateur snipers. Some wealthy individuals paid large sums of money to shoot at the civilian population in Sarajevo from the surrounding hills (1).

The Belgian prosecutor's office may open another criminal case, according to former judge Chris Van den Wyngaert.

The Italian investigation was launched following a complaint filed by journalist and writer Ezio Gavazzeni, who investigated the events.

Several Italian citizens traveled to the Bosnian capital during the siege in the 1990s to join Serbian sniper units and shoot at civilians for sport. The millionaires paid between 80,000 and 100,000 euros to participate in the hunts.

The expeditions were organized by the CIA through a local agent, Jovica Stanišić, who had infiltrated Serbian intelligence (2). According to the newspaper La Repubblica, these were not soldiers, but rather “far-right war tourists.”

Judge Van den Wyngaert, who served for years as a judge on the International Criminal Tribunal and the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, said he was never aware of such practices during his tenure. “I spent seven years at the Tribunal and had never heard of it until now. The rumors have been circulating for a long time, but no evidence has yet been found,” he added.

Van den Wyngaert emphasized that if the Belgians were involved in the crimes, they could not be tried by the International Criminal Tribunal, as it did not yet exist at the time. However, the Belgian public prosecutor's office could still open its own investigation.

Since the alleged perpetrators were civilians, the acts would not fall under the laws of war. “If it’s a matter of murder, the crimes may be subject to a statute of limitations, but they can also be considered crimes against humanity, and those are not subject to a statute of limitations,” he explained. 

Traitor, War Criminal, and CIA Agent

In the 1990s, Stanišić, the organizer of the killings, was the head of Serbia’s State Security Directorate (SDB) and was sentenced in 2023 to 15 years in prison for crimes committed in seven municipalities of Bosnia-Herzegovina.

He is the perfect example of a traitor and double agent. He was the CIA’s main contact in Belgrade. He shared information about the inner workings of Milošević’s government and helped the agency establish a network of secret bases in Bosnia (3).

Although it was already widely known, in 2021 the CIA admitted Stanišić’s role as an infiltrator before the International Criminal Court in The Hague to prevent him from being convicted as a war criminal. They were unsuccessful, although his sentence was reduced from life imprisonment to 15 years in prison.

The trial against Stanišić was the longest in the Tribunal's history. It dragged on for 18 years. In one of its sessions, the lawyer repeatedly stated that Stanišić did not belong to a criminal organization but to the CIA.

During the three-and-a-half-year siege of Sarajevo, Serbian forces committed numerous crimes, but so did the Bosnian forces of Alija Izetbegovic, who fired indiscriminately on the inhabitants of the city's Serbian neighborhoods, a fact that has never been acknowledged.

By the end of the war, more than 100,000 people had died and some two million had been forced to flee their homes. In the capital alone, more than 11,500 civilians died, including 1,601 children.

In March, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte pledged his “unwavering” support for Bosnia's territorial integrity (4). This was the price to be paid for the massacres of the 1990s. 

(1) https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2025/11/11/italy-investigation-siege-of-sarajevo-bosnian-war/
(2) https://mondo.rs/Info/Drustvo/a1459315/jovica-stanisic-agent-cia-ratni-zlocini-sudjenje-haski-tribunal.html
(3) https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2009-mar-01-fg-serbia-spy-cia1-story.html
(4) https://apnews.com/article/bosnia-nato-separatist-serbs-dodik-rutte-b1e5aff3cd0237715aff787eaf0f9ccf

Source: https://mpr21.info/la-fiscalia-de-milan-abre-una-investigacion-por-los-safaris-humanos-de-sarajevo/