A police officer told the trial for the murder of politician Oliver Ivanovic that he received information that powerful Serb businessman Milan Radojicic, a political rival, organised the assassination.
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The Oliver Ivanovic murder trial on Friday. Photo: BIRN.
An ethnic Albanian police officer, identified only by the initials N.B., told Pristina Basic Court on Friday that the police believe that Milan Radojicic, a powerful businessman and vice-president of the Belgrade-backed Srpska Lista political party, organised the murder of rival Kosovo Serb politician Oliver Ivanovic in January 2018.
“According to information that I also transmitted to the [Kosovo police] task force, it is said the murder was organised by Milan Radojicic,” witness N.B. told the trial of six defendants accused of involvement in the murder or tampering with evidence.
“I cannot confirm it… this is information we received from different sources [including] colleagues and citizens,” added N.B., who claimed to have worked in Serb-majority North Mitrovica, where Ivanovic was shot dead, for 17 years.
The indictment in the Ivanovic case accused Radojicic of being the leader of the criminal organised group that organised the murder in January 2018, together with Kosovo Serb businessman Zvonko Veselinovic. They have both denied any involvement and neither man is on trial.
All the witnesses in the trial so far have been reluctant to confirm their previous testimonies given to investigators about the alleged organised criminal group led by Radojicic.
Four of the defendants in the trial – Marko Rosic, Silvana Arsovic, Rade Basara and Nedeljko Spasojevic – are accused of being members of the joint criminal enterprise that murdered Ivanovic.
Two police officers, Dragisa Markovic and Zarko Jovanovic, are also on trial, accused of evidence-tampering in the case. All the defendants have pleaded not guilty.
Witness N.B. claimed that defendant Markovic was on duty the day of Ivanovic’s murder and “talked to the deceased before the murder happened”.
He also confirmed previous testimony in which he said that defendant Spasojevic “using an official police car, prior to Ivanovic’s murder, drove two people around Mitrovica who are suspected of having committed the murder”.
He directed further allegations at defendant Rosic: “I have information that he [Rosic] followed the late Oliver [Ivanovic], set fire to his car and was in Milan Radojicic’s [criminal] group.”
Rosic’s lawyer, Mahmut Halimi, told the court that “the witness did not say anything concrete about the case, and everything he said is related to gossip and unconfirmed information”.
A second witness at Friday’s hearing, a member of the Kosovo police intelligence unit in North Mitrovica, was asked by defendant Basara whether he has any information about him being involved with criminal groups.
“I have never heard anything bad about Basara, no one has ever mentioned that he is related to the crime,” the witness responded.
Ivanovic, leader of the Freedom, Democracy, Justice political party, was once seen as a hardline nationalist, but before his death had evolved into a political moderate who advocated coexistence between Kosovo’s Serb minority and Albanian majority. He had also become increasingly vocal in his criticism of the Belgrade government.
At the time of his death, he was being retried for ordering the murder of Kosovo Albanians during the war in Kosovo in 1999. He pleaded not guilty.
The murder trial continues in late April.
Source link: balkaninsight.com
