Serbia Urged To Get Tough After Gang Killings
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Serbian police. Photo: EPA/Andrej Cukic. |
Serbian criminologist Dobrivoje Radovanovic has warned that Serbia must cooperate more effectively with Montenegro and step up its attempts to combat violent crime after another murder of a Montenegrin citizen in Belgrade.
“Better cooperation between Serbia and Montenegro would help,” Radovanovic told BIRN.
“They should arrest criminals and give them severe punishments, and also prevent them from crossing the border with the feeling that they are untouchable,” he added.
Serbian media reported on June 1 that the dead body of Radovan Laketic from the Montenegrin town of Pljevlja was found in bushes in Belgrade.
Belgrade newspaper Vecernje novosti reported that Laketic, killed with six gunshots, was already known to the Serbian police as he had served eight years in prison for drug trafficking.
His death was the last in a series of murders of Montenegrins citizens in what has been described as a conflict between two rival crime gangs from the Montenegrin coastal resort town of Kotor, Kavac and Skaljari, that has spilled in neighboring Serbia.
In April, Serbian Interior Minister Nebojsa Stefanovic, insisted that Serbia will not be a battlefield for warring Montenegrin drug gangs and said that anyone who could endanger the country’s security will be barred from entering, Tanjug news agency reported.
His statement came after Montenegrin citizen Dalibor Despotovic, who used to work as a bodyguard for the businessman Slobodan Saranovic, was also killed in Belgrade in February.
A month earlier, Davorin Baltic, who media alleged was a member of one of the Montenegrin narcotics gangs, was murdered in the Serbian capital.
In June 2016, the body of Goran Ducic, who was a bodyguard for one of the Montenegrin gangs, was found in the Danube River in the northern Serbian city of Novi Sad.
Some media also speculated that the brutal murder in October 2016 of one of the leaders of the Partizan sports club fans’ group, Aleksandar Stankovic, was connected to the Montenegrin drug gangs.
Criminologist Radovanovic called the killings “classic mafia murders connected to drug gangs with marks of blood revenge”.
Serbian daily Blic in April called the murders part of “the best-known mafia war in the Balkans”.
Top Montenegrin security officials also admitted in April that the situation in their own country was worrying after a series of bomb blasts and assassinations.
Several Montenegrin towns have seen murders and explosions during this ongoing conflict – but police have caught few perpetrators so far.
The situation has been at its worst in Kotor, where 30 people have been reported killed since late 2013, apparently in clashes between the Skaljari and Kavac clans, named after neighbourhoods in Kotor.
According to a database compiled by Serbia’s Crime and Corruption Reporting Network, KRIK, and Radio Free Europe, 115 people have been killed in Montenegro and Serbia in mafia-style murders between 2012 and the end of May this year.
About 73 per cent of the cases remain unresolved with the perpetrators still unknown, while only 5.2 per cent have resulted in verdicts.
Read more:
Montenegrin Gangs Blamed for Killing in Serbia
