Inside the gruesome world of the ‘human safari’

“People don’t actually do that, right?” my publisher asked nervously. “No one actually goes on a human safari, do they?”

Eight years ago, I didn’t know for sure. There had certainly been rumors for years that wealthy foreigners were traveling to conflict zones to kill civilians at random. Gradually I had concluded that some people were indeed heading off to complete their bucket list of horrors.

In my novel To The Lions, I placed the “human safari” in a fictional refugee camp in southern Libya. Concrete proof, however, was almost impossible to find.

Several times during my years as an investigative journalist, I heard stories about nightmarish things going on in places where law and order had collapsed. As part of my job, I visited refugee camps close to the Syrian border and in southern Bangladesh, where hundreds of thousands of Rohingya refugees have fled over years of conflict.

Anyone who has spent time in refugee camps knows that human trafficking is almost routine. If someone isn’t worried about trafficking a preteen girl into a brothel, it’s not an enormous leap to assume that they might be open to enabling other forms of abuse. Slowly, depressingly, I started to realize that if you really wanted to – and, importantly, you had the cash – human safaris were indeed possible.

And now evidence is finally starting to emerge. Prosecutors in Milan have just opened an investigation into Italians who allegedly visited Sarajevo during the Bosnian war in the 1990s to shoot at people trapped in the besieged city. Early on in that war, the main street running into Sarajevo became known as “Sniper Alley.” Thousands of people were killed there over a four-year period. Now prosecutors believe some of these deaths occurred because rich foreigners allegedly paid members of the Bosnian Serb army to escort them to the hills above Sarajevo to shoot and kill citizens.

The prosecution in Milan doesn’t surprise me. When societies collapse, some people will go out and do exactly what they want. While I was reporting in Libya shortly before Muammar Gaddafi was killed in 2011, I watched excitable young men drive very expensive cars extremely fast along the seafront. They’d always wanted to do it, they said cheerfully, and now they could. A few days later they all ran out of gasoline and that was that.

But what would you do if there was no risk of being caught? Some people want to kill. And in our globalized world, I believe that some of those people jump on a plane and head off to those collapsed societies in order to embark on the worst sort of tourism.

The rumors were almost impossible to prove. The people who went on human safaris weren’t going to talk. Those in their sights – some of the most vulnerable people in the world – had no way of knowing what was going on until it was too late. Even if they had their suspicions, they had no one to tell. The rumors continued to emerge in odd places. While I was chasing Somali pirates around the Indian Ocean with the British Navy, the Royal Marines took several captives. It hadn’t been the most equal battle – a US Navy ship on one side of the tiny pirate ship, a British ship on the other and a Lynx helicopter firing rows of bullets straight over the pirate ship’s bow – but the pirates themselves were heavily armed with guns and rocket-propelled grenades.

In the aftermath of the arrests, I went out to the tiny pirate ship with the Marines and spoke to the captives. Most of them were uncommunicative. One pirate – who memorably had six fingers on each hand and six toes on each foot – was rather more chatty. He soon realized I was a journalist and attempted to spark up conversation with me first in fluent Italian and then in fluent German. He couldn’t speak English, but we eventually established that we could both speak French.

After we had discussed the pirate’s cousin (who lived in Manchester), and he had suggested that we get married – a proposal I had to turn down – we moved on to stories he had heard about Russians prowling around the Red Sea attacking Somali pirates. These people, he insisted, were not Russian armed forces. They weren’t mercenaries hired by shipping magnates, either. These were people on expensive, glamorous yachts who wanted to kill someone – anyone. They were there for fun, the pirate said, and it was clear that no expense had been spared.

As my would-be fiancé pointed out, absolutely no one was going to care if a Somali pirate was killed. Out on the high seas, no one would ever even know. And if anyone did find out, they might conclude that the pirate had got what he deserved.

It is this gray area – where people manage to convince themselves that they’re meting out “justice” – that I suspect drives some “human safaris.” It is easy to find videos on social media of vigilantes claiming to have gunned down illegal immigrants who are attempting to cross the US/Mexico border. Heavily armed groups of civilians routinely patrol the border areas.

“We were going out huntin’,” Bryan C. Perry, of Clarksville, Tennessee, announced on TikTok as he set out his plans to head down to the border in 2022. And he was going to “shoot to kill.” If you’re off to kill someone and you’re clearly going to enjoy it, where exactly is the line? Perry is now serving several life sentences.

The late critic A.A. Gill faced a storm of complaints after he admitted that he had shot a baboon to “get a sense of what it might be like to kill someone, a stranger.” He was open in his curiosity, at least. Some people are fascinated by the idea of killing. They want to know how it feels to kill a man, a woman or a child. And in some parts of the world, they can satisfy that urge – and absolutely no one will stop them.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s December 8, 2025 World edition.