Sreten Jocić, better known as Joca Amsterdam, was sentenced on Thursday to fifteen years in prison for inciting the murder of Goran Marjanović and his girlfriend Marija Đorđević. This ended more than four years of first-instance proceedings, during which the accused was mostly free.
The court, presided over by Marija Ilić, established that in July 1995, Jocić hired two policemen, Miodrag Prodanović and Bojan Milosavljević, to kill Marjanović, known as Goksi Bomaš. He provided them with weapons and a getaway car, and when the policemen were arrested after the murder, Jocić managed to escape the country. They were caught and at the trial they cited Jocic as the principal, but he left the country in the meantime.
Jocić's trial for this crime began only after he was extradited to Serbia in 2006 after serving his sentence in the Netherlands. He was released to defend himself in exchange for a 300.000 euro bail, and was arrested again last year, on suspicion of having ordered the murder of Croatian newspaper magnate Ivo Pukanić.
It did not help Jocic that the former policemen suddenly changed their testimony and stopped charging him, as well as the claim that he was in Greece at the time of the murder. The court found that the stamps in Jocic's passport were forged, as well as the guest book at the Belgrade hotel "Interkontinental" in which someone tried to change Jocic's name and ID number. Apart from that, Jocić's role in the murder of Marjanović was confirmed by Zoran Đorđević, whom the accused tried to hire for some other jobs. He, testifying via video link, confirmed that he met with Jocić at "Interkontinental" immediately after the murder and attended his conversations with Prodanović and Milosavljević.
Jocić welcomed the sentence, the maximum according to the criminal law that was valid at the time of Marjanović's murder, with a sour smile on his face. If he is also convicted of Pukanić's murder, he faces a sentence of 40 years.
Read more about Sreten Jocić in the related texts.
