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Lawyer Slobodan Ruzic, a lawyer for the family of journalist Slavko Curuvija, who was murdered in 1999, said tonight that Miroslav Kurak, accused of being the direct perpetrator of that murder, had his Serbian passport extended.
Photo: FoNet / Andrija Ilić“So someone did that, obviously that means he (Kurak) is under protection,” Ruzic told RTS.
According to the prosecution and the media, Kurak, who is a fugitive and is being tried in absentia, moved to Africa, where, as it was written, “he dedicated himself to organizing the big game”.
The chairman of the Investigative Commission on the Murders of Journalists, Veran Matić, said on the same RTS program that of all the communications he had so far, he concluded that there was no “targeted search” for Kurak, and that “all we know roughly where it is, they know and organs. “
Lawyer Ruzic said that yesterday’s revocation of the first instance verdict in the Curuvija case does not mean that the trial is going back to the beginning, but that the Court of Appeals, which decided it, gave an order on what should be done again, and expect a final verdict next year. murder.
It considers that the new first instance procedure will have a maximum duration of five or six months, followed by a verdict and appeals, after which the Court of Appeals must make a final decision.
“Curuvija, after more than twenty years since the murder, deserves justice. I expect a conviction, “Ruzic told RTS.
Ruzic said that all the evidence had already been presented, and that the Court of Appeals, with the explanation of its decision, opened the question that was already open immediately after the first instance verdict, which the first instance court “presented to a unidentified person “as the direct perpetrator of the murder. The Court of Appeals, as a second instance, considered that it exceeds the accusation.
As the lawyer for Curuvija’s family put it, there are other incidents in which people from the State Security Service committed “the most horrible crimes in the late 1990s and early 2000s.”
Matic, president of the Investigation Commission of Homicides of Journalists, said that the investigation should have been finished for 15 years and that the trial of first instance lasted four years, with obstruction on both sides.
“For me, the common denominator in this whole case and many others is total obstruction, from different angles, different segments of society,” Matic emphasized.
Commenting on the decision of the Court of Appeals, he noted that the reasoning does not clearly suggest that the court disputed the evidence as deficient, which he found “optimistic about what follows in the retrial.”
He said that Curuvija’s colleagues, journalists’ associations and the commission he leads will continue to closely monitor the trial.
Journalist Ljiljana Smajlovic said on the same RTS program that Curuvija was “under the measures” of the State Abyss Service all the time, monitored and listened to, remembering how draconian the newspapers she ran, “Dnevni Telegraf” and “Evopljanin” were punished. .
“Delayed justice denies justice,” quoted the American saying Smajlović, an associate of Ćuruvija.
Curuvija was assassinated in April 1999 at the entrance of the building where he lived in Belgrade. The former head of the DB, Radomir Markovic, and the head of the Belgrade center, Milan Radonjic, were sentenced in the first instance to 30 years each, and Ratko Romic and Kurak to 20 years each.
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