Milan public prosecutor investigates rich snipers shooting in Sarajevo

They called them the 'weekend snipers'. That is, wealthy people who, between 1993 and 1995, 'paid to shoot for fun at the citizens of Sarajevo, during the war in Yugoslavia'. The Milan public prosecutor's office is investigating these facts, which the journalist and writer Ezio Gavazzeni has denounced in a complaint, for voluntary manslaughter aggravated by cruelty and abject motives. The aim is to identify who took part in the massacre of over 11,000 people between 1993 and 1995.

The voices of 1995

'The strange thing about this affair is that I had known about it since 1995 when the Corriere della Sera spoke of testimonies given before the Permanent Peoples' Tribunal, which devoted two sessions, one in Barcelona and one in Trento,' says the writer. Hence the idea of 'writing a novel about it, but the idea was then frozen'. To rekindle attention, the documentary Sarajevo Safari from a few years ago. A fifty-minute journey of testimonies and images. 'There was the testimony of the couple who lost their child in a pushchair,' recalls Gavazzeni, 'and also that of the person who ended up in a wheelchair because he was hit in the back by a bullet fired by a sniper.

The complaint filed with the public prosecutor

Hence the start of the journalistic investigation and the recovery of documentation. "In February, with the support of former Magistrate Guido Salvini and lawyer Nicola Brigida, I signed and filed the complaint with the Public Prosecutor's Office,' he says. 'The Public Prosecutor Alessandro Gobbis started the investigation, which was entrusted to the Ros'. In his exposé, Gavezzini recounts a terrifying world. "There were wealthy businessmen and professionals, from northern Italy but also from Spain, France, other European countries as well as Canada and the USA,' he argues, 'who paid to go to the mountains surrounding Sarajevo to shoot people. How did it work? "While not going into details, it is clear that there was a precise organisation that allowed these people to be taken to the place where they could then freely shoot at innocent people".