It was a regular afternoon in May 1995 in Sarajevo. Twelve-year-old Djemil Hodzic was out playing with his elder brother, Amel, 16, in their neighbourhood, amid the chatter and laughter of children and parents gathered nearby.
Amel was playing tennis while Djemil and his friends were busy with marbles. Suddenly, Amel stiffened, struggling to catch his breath, one hand pressed to his chest. Within seconds, a red blot spread across his white T-shirt. It was a few seconds before the other children realised that Amel had been shot by a sniper positioned in the surrounding hills.
“Amel was the tallest among us children — he was an easy target”, recalls Djemil bitterly.
Their mother, a nurse who had just returned from a night shift, was cooking lunch for the children. An ambulance was called, but before it arrived, Amel died in her lap.
Djemil, who interacted with TOI on email, believes his brother fell victim not just to sniper fire, but possibly to what later came to be described as “sniper tourism” — one of the darkest allegations to emerge from the 1992–1995 Bosnian war, widely recognised as Europe’s bloodiest conflict since World War II in which the army of Republika Srpska, the Bosnian Serb force, clashed with the army of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina after it declared independence from Yugoslavia in March 1992.
“Sniper tourism” refers to claims that wealthy foreign nationals paid Bosnian Serb soldiers large sums to shoot at Bosnian civilians, mainly Muslims, from hilltop positions overlooking Sarajevo during the siege. The siege of Sarajevo — which lasted 1,425 days from April 5, 1992, to February 29, 1996 — remains the longest siege of a capital city in modern history.
The war began after Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) declared independence from Yugoslavia. Bosnian Serb leaders, seeking to create a “Greater Serbia,” opposed the move, triggering a conflict that killed nearly 100,000 people and displaced more than a million.
Various estimates suggest over 13,000 people were killed during the siege of Sarajevo, including more than 5,400 civilians. Among them were 1,601 children — some as young as one-year-old. The ghosts of ‘sniper tourism’ resurfaced recently after authorities in Italy opened a probe in Nov 2025 into claims that some of its citizens may have been involved. Italian prosecutors subsequently identified a suspect and summoned an 80-year-old man for questioning earlier in February.
The investigation was triggered by a 17-page complaint filed by Italian journalist and novelist Ezio Gavazzeni, who claims that wealthy foreigners — including Italians — paid between $90,000 and $115,000 to shoot at civilians, with additional payments made to target children.
Gavazenni, who has penned a book on the subject, titled ‘The Snipers of the Weekend’, which will be released in March, told TOI over email that “many of the questions will be answered in it,” while trying to maintain the suspense on the revelations made on the subject in his upcoming book.
Gavazenni had earlier told the Italian media that he got interested in the issue after watching ‘Sarajevo Safari’, a 2022 documentary by Slovenian director Miran Zupanic. Prior to that, he had read reports about sniper tourists in the Italian press in the 1990s, but it was not until he saw the documentary that he began to investigate further. In his complaint, he stated that the Italian suspects flew from Trieste in northern Italy to Belgrade, Serbia, before travelling to the Sarajevo hills to realise their dark plans.
Djemil, too, has launched a project titled 'Sniper Alley', documenting eyewitness accounts and creating an online archive of photographs taken during the siege.
“I found it important to ensure the world does not forget the hell Bosnians went through, while many responsible are still free and unpunished,” he said, adding that “my brother’s final moments changed my life forever.” “For me, the war was over on May 5, 1995, when my brother died. My father was in the army to defend our people. My brother, who was attending Arts High School, before he was killed, would have become eligible to join the army. I never imagined that those beasts who tortured us for three years during the siege of Sarajevo were also capable of shooting children for fun at a time when both armies had agreed to a truce,” he told TOI.
Among the children documented in his archive is one-year-old Irina Cisic, who was hit by sniper fire while out for a walk with her mother on October 12, 1993. She died the next day. Twelve-year-old Nermina Omerovic was shot inside her home while getting ready for school. Ten-year-old Emir Subasic was killed while playing with his younger sibling.
Recounting the horrors of the war, a survivor, Elza (who requested to be identified by her first name only), now 50, termed the reports on ‘sniper tourism’ as "despicable and grisly".
“During the war, I was a teen and had a lot of friends. We would meet in underground spaces and basements of buildings... Every time I would see my friends, I would try to memorise their faces fearing that it could be our last meeting. One night, my fear came true as I heard the shrilling scream of a woman coming from the building across my apartment," Elza recounted.
The screams were of the mother of Elza's friend Kunto, who lived in that building. "I knew that he was gone,” Elza told TOI. Her father, who was a schoolteacher, had joined the Bosnian army and was later killed in action. “During the war, I always prayed for my dad's safety. After I lost him, I never prayed again,” she said.
Harun Mehmedinovic, 42, another survivor, who is now a Bosnian-American filmmaker, said that most people were killed by snipers as they tried to cross the ‘Sniper Alley’ -- which refers to the main boulevard in Sarajevo, particularly the streets Ulica Zmaja od Bosne (Dragon of Bosnia Street) and Mesa Selimovic Boulevard. The two streets formed a key route connecting the city centre to the industrial area and airport in those days.
“Anyone who didn’t live in the city centre had to walk 1-2 km through that perilous alley to get potable water. They became easy targets.” Currently running an online project on Bosnian genocide named ‘The Acts of Reburial’, Harun said, “Through this project, I'm trying to make the outside world aware of those grave crimes.”
Habib AlBadawi, a professor at Lebanese University in Beirut, termed the Italian investigations as a "moral reckoning".
AlBadawi, who has written a research paper on the allegations of 'sniper tourism', titled ‘Hunting Humans- The Paid Killers of Sarajevo and The Milan Investigations’, published in Nov last year, said, "“The siege of Sarajevo remains one of the starkest examples of systematic violence against civilians in modern Europe post World War II. Beneath the familiar narrative of snipers and shelling during the siege, lies a more disturbing layer. The Milan investigation reveals that killing civilians in Sarajevo was, for some, a transactional service. This revelation exposes the darkest capabilities of human nature, when moral restraints collapse entirely,” he said. Explaining why Sarajevo became vulnerable to snipers, the 55-year-old professor cited the city’s topography. “Sarajevo is located in a basin surrounded by mountains which made it particularly vulnerable to siege warfare, transforming the city’s natural geography into an instrument of terror."
In the 'Sarajevo Safari' documentary cited by Gavazzeni, a former Serb soldier and a contractor can be seen claiming that groups of westerners would shoot at the civilian population from the hills around Sarajevo. Gavazzeni, too, claimed ‘many Italians, Germans, French, English and people from other western countries, who paid large sums of money, were taken there to shoot civilians’. His claims have since been vehemently denied by Serbian war veterans.
Yet, even as they describe the allegations as deeply disturbing, survivors, too, emphasise the need for evidence.
“We want those responsible punished. But the sad reality is that many war criminals will never be prosecuted for lack of evidence,” Elza said.
Harun echoed the caution. “Unless there is proof, it remains speculative in the world’s eyes. Courts need hard evidence — arrest warrants, charges — to make it real.”
Incidentally, even after three decades, several buildings in Sarajevo still bear the marks of bullets and shrapnel from artillery shells. As Chan Siu Ki from Hong Kong, a travel vlogger who visited the city in 2018, put it, "The buildings have become ordinary apartments now, with advertisements hung on the rooftop and walls, as if nothing had ever happened."
For residents, though, the bullet-ridden walls are reminders of a chilling past. For outsiders, they are questions etched in concrete.
