The Bosnian War was an international armed conflict that took place in Bosnia and Herzegovina between 1992 and 1995. The Bosnian City of Sarajevo spent most of that time under siege. Lasting 1,425 days, it was the longest siege of a capital city in the history of modern warfare. According to reports, wealthy foreigners spent large sums of money for the opportunity to shoot at civilians in the besieged city for entertainment. The Sarajevo Safari is the name for the alleged war tourism that took place during that time involving human hunting. The foreigners were described as sniper tourists and were characterized as “the most terrifying element of life under siege in Sarajevo.”

In 2022 the premiere of the Slovenian documentary film Sarajevo Safari, directed by Miran Zupanič and co-produced by Al Jazeera Balkans brought international attention to the the region’s history. The alleged activity took place from established positions of the Army of Republika Srpska (VRS) in the hills surrounding Sarajevo. In response to the film’s release, an official investigation was launched by the Prosecutor’s Office of Bosnia and Herzegovina in November 2022. In November 2025, the Public Prosecutor’s Office in Milan (Italy) also opened an investigation into the alleged participation of Italian citizens in these acts. Officials from Republika Srpska and war veterans’ associations sharply denied all allegations, calling them “propaganda” and “heinous lies” directed against the VRS and the Serb people.

Rumors about the Sarajevo Safari existed for decades. In the 1990s, the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera reported on the possibility of Italian extremists traveling to Bosnia to spend weekends as snipers. The phenomenon was also mentioned in the book The Bastards of Sarajevo (Italian: I bastardi di Sarajevo) by the Italian author Luca Leone. The 1992 documentary “Serbian Epics” by Paweł Pawlikowski featured Russian nationalist Eduard Limonov hosted by Radovan Karadžić on the hills above Sarajevo and firing a machine gun with a telescopic sight at the besieged town.

Following the discovery of earlier, independent testimony before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), the film’s allegations gained weight. In The Hague in 2007 during the trial of General Dragomir Milošević, commander of the VRS’s Sarajevo-Romanija Corps., John Jordan, a former US Marine and firefighter, testified under oath that on “several occasions” he witnessed individuals he described as “tourist snipers,” based on their “clothing and weaponry” being escorted by local officers. Jordan said he saw the individuals while he was visiting the Serb firefighters in Grbavica. This location matches the testimony from Zupanič’s film.