BELGRADE – Director of the Serbian government’s Office for Kosovo-Metohija (KiM) Marko Djuric called Thursday for an urgent revision of EULEX activities in Kosovo-Metohija and also for judicial authorities to investigate allegations made by Belgrade-based daily Politika, which had accused a prosecutor of that mission of falsifying evidence in the case against the leader of the Citizens’ Initiative ‘Freedom, Democracy, Justice’ (GI SDP).
GI SDP leader “(Oliver) Ivanovic is the most moderate (Serb) politician in KiM and keeping him in prison is a blow to the rule of law,” Djuric said on a Radio Belgrade talk show.
Djuric considers it very important that the judicial authorities investigate the allegations from today’s edition of Politika as he believes that the oldest newspaper in the country would not go public with such information if it did not have any evidence to support the allegations.
Politika says that in an indictment against Ivanovic, EULEX special prosecutor Cezari Mihalcuk falsified parts of official letters received from the Serbian Interior Ministry (MUP).
The daily reports that the indictment says that Belgrade’s letters “contain indications that the defendant may have been a reservist in a MUP special police unit during the (1999 Kosovo) war,” and that the prosecutor referred to an official MUP document, issued by the MUP war crimes department administration.
Politika, however, says that the two documents that Serbia sent upon request by the special prosecutor show something completely contrary to the allegations in the indictment, since MUP actually informed EULEX that Oliver Ivanovic had never been enlisted with MUP as either active member or member of the MUP reserves.
Oliver Ivanovic has been in detention since January 27, and the Kosovo Special Prosecution Office issued an indictment against him on August 11.
Ivanovic is charged with ordering the murder of four ethnic Albanians that occurred in Kosovska Mitrovica on March 14, 1999 (during the armed conflict in Kosovo and the NATO bombing of Serbia).
The GI SDP leader is also charged with inciting the killing of 10 ethnic Albanians in unrest on February 3, 2000, following an incident where a bomb was thrown into a club in North Mitrovica and had several Serbs wounded.
