19. 12. 2004

JOURNALIST ASSOCIATION RECEIVES INFROMATION ON MURDER

BELGRADE, December 19, 2004 – The president of the Independent Association of Serbian Journalists has confirmed for B92 that the organisation has received two letters giving details of the murder of Vecernje Novosti report Milan Pantic. Association President Nebojsa Bugarinovic said that the letters were also sent to the Special Prosecutor for Organised Crime, Jovan Prijic, adding that they include very detailed information about Pantic’s death. Meanwhile the Serbian Government has still not reacted to information revealed by a B92 investigative crew on the identity of the murderer of publisher Slavko Curuvija in 1999. B92 named the murderer as Montenegrin organised crime figure Luka Pejovic and revealed that the Serbian Interior Ministry had been aware of this for more than a year. A deputy prime minister in the former government, Zarko Korac, told B92 that the former internal affairs minister, Dusan Mihajlovic, had reported to the cabinet on Curuvija’s murder saying that the investigation was progressing very slowly. Korac also quoted Mihajlovic as saying at one point during the investigation that a witness had come forward with more precise details on the description of the killer. “The prosecution must demand urgent answers from the Internal Affairs Ministry on the authenticity of these details. As far as I recall, the main problem at the time was that we had a possible witness to the crime and that this was not sufficient to initiate a more serious investigation that would have provided the answers needed,” said Korac. A one-time colleague of Curuvija, Aleksandar Tijanic, now director of Radio Television Serbia, said that Mihajlovic after October 5, 2000, Mihajlovic had given him a note with the names of two individuals whom the former minister claimed had killed Curuvija. “I wrote those names down somewhere and put them away. The last name of one of the individuals did not end in ‘ic’. Then he told me that one of them was dead and that the other had disappeared somewhere in the Republic of Srpska. Neither of the two names is the one you have given me now,” said Tijanic. Biljana Kovacevic Vuco of the Committee of Human Rights Lawyers said that the information uncovered by B92 on the identity of Slavko Curuvija’s killer might not get the case reopened but that, nevertheless, it created a very alarming situation. If Serbia was a state governed by the rule of law, she said, and if it had not been corrupted to the extent which it was under Milosevic, any information or rumour of this kind would be cause for an investigation of who was responsible for withholding the information from the public and would lead to the uncovering of who was behind the murder of Curuvija.