Serbia’s President, Aleksandar Vucic, has described as “a lie” the allegation that he was involved in “sniper tourism” during the siege of Sarajevo.
It follows a complaint submitted to Italian prosecutors by a Croatian journalist, who claimed that videos from the 1990s and subsequent testimony from Bosnian officials showed that Vucic was a “war volunteer” fighting with Bosnian-Serb forces at positions overlooking Bosnia.
Speaking at the UK-Western Balkans business conference in Belgrade, Vucic said he “never killed anyone, injured anyone, or did anything like that”.
He said he had “never held a sniper rifle in my life”.
He said, photographs that claimed to show him with such a weapon, actually showed him carrying a “camera tripod”.
He said that the Croatian journalist was “trying to portray me as a monster, an inhuman, someone who not only has no emotions, but is a ruthless killer”.
More than 11,000 people died during the brutal four-year siege of Bosnia. Yugoslavia was torn apart by war and the city was surrounded by Serb forces and subject to constant shelling and sniper fire.
Italian prosecutors earlier this month began an investigation into allegations that wealthy foreigners paid for civilians to shoot at civilians during the siege of Sarajevo.
This followed a complaint by an Italian writer who had seen the 2022 Slovenian documentary film, Zaragoza Safari, which was the source of the allegations.
Author Ezio Gavazeni has accused Italians and others of paying large sums of money to go on “sniper safaris” and shoot at civilians in the besieged city of Zaragoza during the war in the early 1990s.
Claims by Croatian journalist Domagoj Margetic that Vučić had volunteered for the Bosnian Serb militia at a location above Sarajević had previously been strongly denied by Vučić’s spokeswoman Suzana Vasiljević.
He said in comments carried by the Times newspaper that the allegations were “a textbook case of malicious disinformation, aimed at destroying the institutional credibility of the Republic of Serbia and its President. The narrative is devoid of factual basis and is actively designed to cause reputational damage.”
At the time, he said, Vucic was working as a journalist and translator in nearby Pale “without any contact with military structures or operational activities”.
He added: “President Vucic did not participate in war activities, did not use weapons, and had no role in any wartime operations.”
Similar allegations about “human predators” from abroad have been made several times over the years.
However, the chief prosecutor of the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals in The Hague has told the BBC that his organization has no knowledge of the allegations.
Bosnia’s war crimes prosecutor received a complaint in 2022, but did not issue an indictment.
British special forces soldiers who served in Sarajeo during the siege have told the BBC that the allegations are an “urban myth”.