On a seemingly ordinary Sunday in June 1995, Sarajevo briefly resembled a city trying to live despite war. Sixteen-year-old Damir Šahat rode his blue BMX bicycle through the streets, while his family prepared a modest dinner of filled pastry he had requested. Within minutes, that fragile normality collapsed. A sniper’s bullet struck him in the chest on a main road exposed to fire from surrounding hills. According to Die Zeit, a German daily newspaper, Damir became one of more than 11,500 people killed during the siege of Sarajevo, including more than 1,600 children.
The siege, which lasted from 1992 to 1995, is described in the reporting as one of the defining tragedies of the post-Yugoslav wars. Sarajevo was encircled by Bosnian Serb forces and elements of the former Yugoslav army, who positioned artillery and sniper units in the surrounding mountains. From those heights, they controlled visibility over civilian streets, including the now-infamous corridor known as “Sniper Alley,” where residents were forced to run across open ground under fire.
Die Zeit details how everyday survival in the city became a calculation of timing and luck. Water collection, food distribution, and even short crossings between buildings carried lethal risk. From elevated positions such as the Jewish cemetery on Mount Trebević, shooters reportedly had clear lines of sight across major parts of the city.
Against this backdrop of sustained violence, the investigation revisits one of the most controversial and still unproven sets of allegations to emerge from the war: that wealthy foreign nationals may have traveled to Sarajevo and paid to participate in shooting civilians. These claims, drawn from the book I cecchini del weekend by Italian author Ezio Gavazzeni and referenced in Die Zeit’s reporting, describe a system in which individuals allegedly paid significant sums for access to sniper positions.
According to these allegations, the supposed prices varied depending on the target. Killing a man was reportedly priced at the equivalent of around 25,000 euros, while shooting a woman allegedly cost about 40,000 euros, and targeting a child as much as 50,000 euros. The claims suggest that participants treated these killings as a form of extreme excursion, with some accounts describing them as “war tourism” or “human safaris.” These assertions remain unverified and are the subject of ongoing legal and journalistic scrutiny in parts of Europe.
Some witness accounts cited in Die Zeit go further, describing individuals who allegedly traveled in groups and were transported to front-line positions in the hills above Sarajevo. These accounts portray a disturbing overlap between war zones and civilian leisure cultures, with comparisons made by observers to hunting expeditions. One recurring description likens their equipment and behaviour to that of recreational hunters rather than soldiers, although no definitive proof has been established.
The investigation also notes that Sarajevo’s geography made it uniquely vulnerable. The city lies in a deep valley surrounded by steep, wooded hills, allowing armed groups to maintain surveillance and fire control over civilian movement. One of the key elevated positions was the Jewish cemetery on Mount Trebević, which reportedly served as a strategic overlook during the siege.
Die Zeit emphasizes that while these allegations have circulated for years, they remain difficult to confirm. Much of the evidence relies on testimonies collected long after the war, wartime rumours, and fragmented intelligence reports. Nonetheless, the persistence of these claims has prompted renewed legal interest in parts of Europe, including questions about whether foreign nationals may have been involved in wartime crimes in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
What is not in dispute is the scale of suffering during the siege. Sarajevo endured nearly four years of continuous bombardment and sniper fire, with more than 11,000 people killed and tens of thousands injured. Civilians adapted their lives to constant threat, moving through streets in sudden bursts of movement to avoid being targeted from above.
Die Zeit also revisits how the war was documented at the time by journalists and residents. Reports from inside the city described a surreal environment in which ordinary life persisted under extreme danger. Markets operated intermittently, children attempted to attend school in basements, and residents learned to interpret patterns of gunfire to survive daily routines.
The article further highlights how many aspects of the alleged “sniper tourism” remain unresolved. Some intelligence sources and wartime reports are said to have mentioned the possibility of foreign participants, but no comprehensive or publicly confirmed investigation has definitively proven these claims. As a result, the allegations occupy a contested space between testimony and historical uncertainty.
For survivors like Damir’s family, however, the uncertainty is secondary to the loss. His sister Danijela still lives in Sarajevo, a city where victims and alleged perpetrators often continued to live side by side after the war ended. Their lives unfold in the same physical spaces where violence once defined daily existence.
Die Zeit frames the Sarajevo siege as both a documented historical catastrophe and an unresolved moral landscape. While the facts of the siege’s devastation are clear, the more sensational allegations surrounding paid participation in killings remain unproven but persistent, continuing to challenge how the war is remembered and investigated.
Decades later, Sarajevo remains a city rebuilt but not fully reconciled with its past. The scars of mortar impacts still mark its pavements, and the questions raised by witnesses and authors continue to echo above the hills where, during the war, civilians once ran for their lives under the sight of unseen shooters.
