Irina Cesic celebrated her first birthday on October 8, 1993. Four days later, she was killed by a sniper’s bullet on the streets of the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo.
“Since Irina had just learned to walk, my wife Stana was holding her by the hand,” Irina’s father, Samir Cesic, told RFE/RL. “We never understood why someone would shoot at a 50–60-centimeter target — the height of a one-year-old girl — instead of a much larger one, like my wife, who would have been easier to hit.”
For three decades, Irina’s parents have sought an answer: Was their daughter killed simply to cause more pain and suffering? In recent days, their grief has been reignited by reports in the Italian media about an investigation being conducted in Milan into the so-called “weekend snipers.”
According to the Italian newspapers Il Giorno and La Repubblica, and the news agency ANSA, prosecutors are investigating claims that during the 1992-1995 war in Bosnia-Herzegovina, wealthy foreigners paid “large sums of money” to shoot civilians in besieged Sarajevo — “for fun.”
The Milan prosecutor’s office did not respond to RFE/RL’s inquiry regarding the current stage of the investigation or against whom it may have been initiated.
An Olympic City Under Sniper Fire
Sarajevo was surrounded by the Army of the Republika Srpska from 1992 to 1995. With a siege lasting 1,425 days, it was one of the longest sieges of a city in modern European history.
More than 1,600 children were killed, and 14,000 children were wounded.
Every 10th child killed in the city that had hosted the 1984 Olympic Games was hit by a sniper, according to data from victims’ associations and judgments by UN courts.
Despite this, not a single sniper has ever been held personally accountable — neither before Bosnian nor international courts.
In verdicts against the highest officials of Republika Srpska, the UN International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) concluded that the sniper campaign had a single objective: “to terrorize the civilians.”
Florence Hartmann, a former spokesperson for the ICTY prosecutor’s office, told RFE/RL that they “were aware” of so-called “death tourism expeditions.”
“We knew about it. We didn’t know how it was organized. It is extremely important that a judicial investigation has been launched and that those who organized it are identified,” Hartmann told RFE/RL.
‘Hunting In Sarajevo’
Benjamina Karic, mayor of Sarajevo’s Centar municipality, was one year old when the war began. After watching the premiere of a documentary about the alleged killings, Sarajevo Safari, in 2022, she filed a criminal complaint with Bosnia’s Prosecutor-General’s Office and later with Italian authorities.
“That rich people came to Sarajevo on weekends to kill our children — it’s the darkest thing one can imagine,” Karic told RFE/RL.
She received no response until mid-2025. In August, through the Italian Embassy in Bosnia, she filed an additional criminal complaint with new information provided by Italian journalist Ezio Gavazzeni.
Gavazzeni took an interest in the case and contacted prosecutors in Milan with the help of former judge Guido Salvini, but neither he nor Salvini responded to RFE/RL’s inquiry.
“Everything that has been happening lately gives a glimmer of hope that at least a fraction of justice will be served,” Karic told RFE/RL.
In several ICTY verdicts, the UN court emphasized that the sniper campaign was designed to “terrorize civilians.”
“Sarajevo civilians were targeted by snipers while going to fetch water. Snipers fired at children as they played in front of their homes, walked with their parents, returned from school, or rode their bicycles,” said judge O-Gon Kwon, reading the verdict against Radovan Karadzic, the wartime president of Republika Srpska, who was sentenced to life imprisonment in 2019.
During the trial of Dragomir Milosevic — the commander of the Sarajevo-Romanija Corps of the Army of Republika Srpska, who was sentenced by the ICTY to 29 years in prison in 2007 — American firefighter John Jordan testified about foreigners who paid to come to Sarajevo and shoot civilians from positions held by Serbian forces.
“The locals carried certain weapons, and when a guy shows up with a weapon that looks more like he ought to be hunting boar in the Black Forest [in Germany] than in urban combat in the Balkans — when you see him handling it and can obviously tell he’s a novice at moving around rubble, you know, if it walks like a duck, talks like a duck, it’s a duck,” Jordan said in February 2007.
According to the criminal complaint filed with the Milan prosecutor’s office, there was allegedly a “price list” for the so-called “Sarajevo Safari” for wealthy foreigners, including Americans, Canadians, Russians, and Italians.
Children were said to be the most expensive targets, followed by women, then men, while the elderly could allegedly be killed for free, according to the ANSA news agency.
Italian media also report that during the war, Bosnian intelligence services, based on how the operation was organized, believed that the State Security Service (SDB) of Serbia and the former head of the Serbian secret service, Jovica Stanisic — later sentenced to 15 years in prison by the UN ICTY for war crimes — were behind the operation.
‘Verifying The Allegations’
If prosecutors in Milan bring indictments and prove guilt, it would mark the first case where sniper killings of civilians in Bosnia-Herzegovina are brought before a court.
In May 2021, Bosnia’s Prosecutor-General’s Office opened a case against several individuals following the release of a video — the authenticity of which RFE/RL could not confirm — showing one of the snipers from the Army of Republika Srpska boasting that he had “hit someone right in the head.”
“On April 2, 2025, the…prosecutor’s office of Bosnia-Herzegovina transferred the case to the [lower] prosecutor’s office of the Sarajevo canton regarding sniper activity in Sarajevo. The assigned prosecutor is actively taking steps to verify the allegations in the report,” Azra Bavcic, spokeswoman for the prosecutor’s office of Sarajevo Canton, told RFE/RL.
According to the High Judicial and Prosecutorial Council of Bosnia-Herzegovina, more than 3,200 war crimes cases remain unresolved in the country, over 2,900 of which are “in the initial phase,” meaning that no suspects have been identified or the crimes have not been fully investigated.
More than 150 suspects are currently outside Bosnia, mainly in Serbia and Croatia. Croatia and Serbia do not extradite their own citizens to other countries, and they can only be tried within their jurisdictions.
Enver Iseric, a law professor from Sarajevo, told RFE/RL that Bosnia’s Prosecutor-General’s Office has not even prosecuted all the individuals on the so-called “A list” provided by the UN court, “which should have been a priority.”
“That’s why no Bosnian war criminal has ever been prosecuted for sniping children, or for paying to come to Bosnia to kill and satisfy their animalistic urges. Thirty years after the war, hundreds of war criminals still walk freely, while their victims see them on the streets.”
