According to a book, gun enthusiasts who travelled thousands of miles to shot at defenceless civilians for amusement during the siege of Sarajevo competed to see who could kill the most attractive women.
Between 1992 and 1995, wealthy visitors from Russia, Canada, and the US paid Serbian warriors to participate in the so-called Sarajevo Safari while on weekend getaways to the predominantly Muslim city.
A 2022 documentary examined the disgusting allegations from the violent conflict, which claimed the lives of over 11,500 civilians. It claimed that Western visitors, including Brits, Germans, Spaniards, and Italians, as well as shooters from the US, Canada, and Russia, paid more to shoot at children.
Domagoj Margetic, a Croatian writer, has published a book titled Pay and Shoot that includes a large number of documents that were given to him by a Bosnian intelligence officer prior to his death in 1996.
According to The Times, Nedzad Ugljen collected evidence of the “safari,” including documents demonstrating that the tourists paid their Serbian handlers 80,000 marks, or over £35,000 at the time, to shoot at middle-aged men and women.
However, pregnant women were the most costly “targets,” costing 110,000 marks, while young ladies would fetch a greater price of 95,000 marks.
“Ugljen also wrote the foreigners competed to see who could shoot the most beautiful women,” Margetic stated.
According to the spy, “many” of the Bosnian-Serb militia members who received the foreign snipers said that a European royal was one of the participants.
According to a book, gun enthusiasts who travelled thousands of miles to shot at defenceless civilians for amusement during the siege of Sarajevo competed to see who could kill the most attractive women.
He claimed that “he would arrive by helicopter, stay in Vogosca near Sarajevo, and wanted to shoot at children.”
The book also describes how a Croatian who had previously worked for Yugoslav intelligence came up with the concept for the “safari” in Croatia rather than Serbia.
Margetic’s book supports earlier assertions that ordinary individuals looking for excitement may have contributed to the indiscriminate carnage during those years in addition to Bosnian-Serb militias.
Wealthy foreigners wanted to get involved and paid well to fulfil their desires by visiting Sarajevo on weekends to take part in a “human safari.”
Italian officials began looking into the allegations in November 2025, and survivors are optimistic that the truth will eventually come to light.
For decades, there have been whispers about how true the claims are.
Former US Marine John Jordan testified before the United Nations-led ad hoc international criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague in 2007.
Regarding his time spent serving as a UN fireman in Sarajevo, the war-torn capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina, between 1992 and 1995, the veteran made startling assertions.
The crisis started when Bosnian-Serb forces besieged the city for 44 months, cutting off food and electricity and using shelling and cannon fire to burn entire districts on fire. This was sparked by Bosnia and Herzegovina’s decision to secede from federal Yugoslavia.
In order to aid people during the longest siege in modern combat history, Jordan set up shop in Sarajevo. Years later, he testified about the atrocities he saw.
Following the historic trial, Bosnian-Serb commander Dragomir Milosevic was sentenced to 33 years in prison for murder, cruel treatment, and leading a terror campaign that killed thousands of people, mostly Muslims.
Jordan testified throughout the trial about other atrocities, such as the Serb’s indiscriminate targeting of civilians without weapons. While attending to a fire at the city’s frontline, just north of the Bosnian-Serb-held Grbavica district, he was wounded in the chest.
In his testimony, he also recounted how Serb snipers appeared to specifically target the youngest member of a family in order to “cause the most pain to survivors.”
“A child would be shot if they were walking with an adult.” The youngest member of the family would be walking. According to his statement, “it seemed that the most attractive would be shot in a crowd of girls.”
However, he then made another dark accusation that has not yet been proven in court: that Sarajevo was teeming with “shooter tourists” who had travelled abroad and paid well to snipe for the Serb side as a weekend pastime. “I had witnessed on more than one occasion personnel who did not appear to be locals by their dress, by the weapons they carried, by the way they were being handled, i.e., guided around by the locals,” Jordan testified in court.
When the judge asked him to elaborate, he explained that these “tourist shooters” used weaponry better suited to “hunting boar in the Black Forest than urban combat in the Balkans” and wore a “civilian-military” combination-style outfit that set them apart from the Serb fighters.
Jordan claimed that the foreigners were “completely unfamiliar” with the city and that they were “being led, literally almost by the hand, around an area by people who are familiar with it.”
But in the end, the veteran’s testimony was unpersuasive. Although he acknowledged that he “never actually saw one take a shot,” he maintained that he had seen armed foreigners in Grbavica and other neighbourhoods.
However, Jordan’s accusations persisted and eventually attracted attention and conjecture.
The documentary “Sarajevo Safari,” which was produced in 2022 by Slovenian filmmaker Miran Zupanič, collected testimonies from people who claimed to have personally witnessed such conduct.
An unidentified Slovenian guy who served as a US intelligence officer during the Balkan Wars was one of the interviews. He claimed to have made about 35 trips to Bosnia between 1992 and 1994.
As they leave Sarajevo’s Kosevo hospital after her husband was injured by a shell in 1995, a little child looks up at his sobbing mother.
Peering from behind the wheel of a United Nations truck in Sarajevo in 1995, a Bosnian man caught down by sniper fire seeks cover behind it.
The former agent described the foreign participants in the “safari,” of which he saw seven, as belonging to the “upper echelons.”
“These individuals were undoubtedly not typical people.” They were powerful, well-protected individuals who, after having had all, thought, “Why shouldn’t I now shoot a child or an adult in Sarajevo and gain another pleasure? He declared, “I won’t just kill animals. I never heard the prices.” “All I know is that it was extremely costly and that a child’s price was higher,” he continued.
The witness gave a detailed account of how, after being prepared with a green uniform, a helmet, and a bulletproof vest, he was invited on one of the safaris and escorted into a military SUV.The witness stated, “They told me they would show me the close positions of their soldiers,” but when the SUV came to a stop in front of a building, he noticed something strange about the so-called troops. “There I saw three gentlemen whose faces immediately told me they were not Bosnia, not Serbs, not Montenegrins, they had to be from the West.”
One of them even had a Russian appearance. The face tells me. You could tell that something was going to happen because they were ready. I mistook them for foreign journalists.I then made the connection. He remarked, “These men were eager to come and do something.”
“I was horrified by the safari,” he said, describing how the group was led from the SUVs into two “camouflaged” rooms where participants, assisted by spotters, fired at civilians, including women and children, from alternating positions. It’s the height of immorality. The former intelligence officer described the killing as “such violent, inhumane killing.”
He was even asked if he would like to participate. An official asked, “Are you interested in something adrenaline-filled?” which he allegedly turned down.
I could see because I had my own binoculars. The person dropped after the man fired. Because the head is harder, the majority were struck in the chest. However, I also witnessed a blow to the head. The former agent described one of the shots, saying, “From that, I saw they were very good hunters.”
The unnamed witness claimed that the Serbs advised him to “never repeat” the events he witnessed, which he referred to as the “dark side” of the conflict.
However, the affluent visitors themselves appeared unaffected and unconcerned by the purported horror. “You fired your trophy shot and went home,” the former agent remarked, taking offence at their lack of concern.
The accusations have been refuted by Serbian war veterans.
