At the end of a day spent killing women and children with their expensive sniper rifles, the visitors to Sarajevo liked to celebrate until the small hours, devouring roast pork and knocking back brandy.
“They would go to the cafe at 6 to 7pm and stay until 5am, singing and laughing,” recalls Aleksandar Licanin, who says he witnessed the revelry.
The foreigners who paid for the privilege of killing innocent civilians were mainly wealthy men, but there were women too, claimed Licanin, 63, who was a volunteer with a Bosnian Serb tank unit at the time. They included Britons, Italians and Germans, he said.
Reports have circulated for years about the so-called Sarajevo safari, which is said to have drawn rich foreigners to the hills above the Bosnian capital in the early 1990s as it was besieged by Bosnian Serb forces during the Balkan wars.
Photographers Paul Lowe and David Turnley run for cover beside the Holiday Inn hotel, which was home to the media during the war, in 1992 TOM STODDART/GETTY IMAGES In return for payments of up to £88,000, the visitors were allegedly allowed to use Bosnian Serb sniper positions to shoot residents taking cover in the city below, reportedly paying more for the privilege of killing children or pregnant women. Their victims were among the more than 11,500 slain during the four-year siege. Licanin agreed to meet The Times in Bosnia to reveal everything he remembers about the alleged shooters, as magistrates in Italy investigate claims that Italian hunters were among them. On Monday they questioned an 80-year-old truck driver and gun collector from Pordenone in northeast Italy, who denied involvement. Three more suspected Italian shooters are due to be questioned. • Wealthy foreigners ‘paid for chance to shoot civilians in Sarajevo’ After staying silent for three decades, Licanin said he was ready to talk because the Italian investigation was under way. “I want the truth to come out and I was waiting for a real investigation to start,” he said as he chain-smoked in a café in his hometown of Prijedor. Aleksandar Licanin TOM KINGTON FOR THE TIMES “I am prepared to stand up and tell the Italian magistrates what I know.” According to Licanin, his war got under way in 1993 when the Bosnian Serb community he belonged to in Sarajevo split with the local Muslim Bosniaks, as ethnic and religious rifts started to fuel conflict across the disintegrating Yugoslavia. Interned by Bosniaks, the then 31-year-old made it to the Serb-controlled Grbavica neighbourhood of Sarajevo and signed up with a tank unit run by Bosnian Serb forces which took part in the deadly siege of Bosniak-held areas. His commander, Slobodan Todorovic, was a former officer in the disbanded Yugoslav army, Licanin said. Setting up in the city’s Jewish cemetery, which commanded views over Sarajevo, Licanin’s unit shared the vantage point with a 200-strong Serb militia, the Novosarajevo Chetnik Detachment run by former postal worker Slavko Aleksic. Licanin said his unit was fed co-ordinates to target by commanders, but Aleksic’s snipers were picking off their own victims. “Aleksic had a restricted area in the cemetery 200 metres from us which we could see,” he said. “They were shooting at women, children and the elderly. They were out of control and Aleksic was obviously a psychopath, you could see it in his eyes.” Licanin said he first saw well-dressed foreigners taking up positions with Aleksic’s snipers in 1993 or 1994. “They wore expensive leather jackets and I was told they were Italians, Germans and British,” he said. “They were helped to find targets, and shooting from the cemetery was a clear shot — you had everything.” The foreigners, who were billeted in a compound near the cemetery, would also hand over 500 to 1,000 Deutsche Marks [about £200 to £400] to be given a prized sniper spot in tall buildings, Licanin said. “After the hunt a cafe would be cleared out to make room for them and Aleksic’s jeep, which had a skull mounted on the bonnet, would arrive. We would leave: we didn’t want contact with them,” said Licanin. “They ate a lot, feasting on meat — roast pig and lamb,” he said, adding that beer, whisky and cognac were also served. “They were celebrating killing people. I can’t imagine how you can live with killing a child.” Licanin added that he was not surprised to see foreign women paying to kill. “It seemed normal since the Serbians had female snipers too,” he said. “All of the snipers were just pure sadists.” A Sarajevo resident runs to avoid snipers in 1992 GEORGES GOBET/AFP His claim that women were among the tourist snipers was backed up by Zlatko Miletic, the then chief of police in Sarajevo who was running an anti-sniper team. “I remember a woman from Romania who must have killed more than ten people,” he told Balkan news channel N1 this month. “Those foreign snipers were deeply dug into concrete trenches and it was difficult to neutralise them,” claimed Miletic, who is now a member of parliament in Bosnia. “They killed dozens of children and women,” he said, adding: “We had information that [the Aleksic militia] was hosting these people for money and that most of them came from Italy.” Licanin claimed that one of the Serbs helping the foreign snipers was Aleksandar Vucic, then a young member of the far-right Serbian Radical Party, today the authoritarian president of Serbia. Aleksandar Vucic in an interview earlier this month DJORDJE KOJADINOVIC/REUTERS “He would be at the cafe and would translate for the foreigners,” Licanin said. Vucic has said he was not working with Aleksic at the time but merely present in Sarajevo as a journalist. • Serbian president denies ‘human safari in Sarajevo’ claims Licanin was encouraged to speak out by Croatian investigative journalist Domagoj Margetic, who also claimed in November that Vucic was involved in the “human safari”. He was dismissed as a peddler of “malicious disinformation, purpose-built to erode the institutional credibility of the Republic of Serbia and its president”, by a spokeswoman for the Serb leader. Domagoj Margetic TOM KINGTON FOR THE TIMES Aleksic died in December, but just before his death he denied that Vucic was part of his militia and ruled out hosting foreign snipers. Margetic has since alleged that Serbian intelligence may have engineered his demise in case he changed his story. The theory was also promoted by a Serbian lawyer, Cedomir Stojkovic, who was accused of “inciting violent change of the constitutional order” by a Serbian court, banned from posting on social media and is now under house arrest after refusing to comply. In Zagreb, Margetic told The Times that before his death, Aleksic left his archive to an ex-militia colleague who has now handed it to him. Margetic produced type-written documents apparently bearing Aleksic’s signature giving Vucic permission to escort foreigners in Bosnia in the early 1990s. The journalist has denied allegations that the documents are fake and has posted some online, including one which names an Italian shooter. Margetic has redacted the Italian’s name, leaving only the initials R.R. “I have informed the Italian magistrates of his name,” he said. Margetic claimed he had been hearing reports about the shootings since the late 1990s. “Associates of Aleksic told me you could pay to fly in by helicopter to Sarajevo, or travel there by truck from Belgrade, or by a bus with Serbian volunteers which left Belgrade on Thursday nights and returned on Sunday. The return fare was 2,000 Deutsche Marks [about £800].” Witnesses in Sarajevo at the time have since said that shootings increased at weekends. Margetic said he was told by militia contacts that shooters came from Russia, Romania, Greece, Italy, Spain, France, Germany, the US, Canada and the UK. He added: “I was told they would pay more to shoot children and pregnant women.” Claims of the human safari story have emerged slowly since the 1990s. In 2007 US Marine John Jordan, who was in Sarajevo at the time, spoke of “tourist shooters”. A 2022 documentary by Slovenian film maker Miran Zupanic called Sarajevo Safari prompted Italian journalist Ezio Gavazzeni to investigate, in turn triggering the Italian investigation. A former Bosnian intelligence officer, Edin Subasic, has said that a Serbian soldier taken prisoner in Sarajevo revealed he had met a group of five Italian snipers. After Subasic complained to Italian intelligence officers, they told him in early 1994 they had put a stop to the visits. Lighting another cigarette in the cafe in Prijedor, Licanin said he recalled seeing foreigners shooting in Sarajevo right up until the Dayton Agreement finally put an end to hostilities over a year later, in November 1995. After the war he got married and found work as a lumberjack, but the trauma of combat never left him. “My wife says I still have nightmares, although I don’t remember them in the morning,” he said. “The foreigners who came to Sarajevo had sick minds. I bet they don’t have nightmares.”
