Clan leaders Veljko Belivuk and Marko Miljković say that they are not guilty of any kidnapping and murder in Ritopek and that they did not deal in drugs and weapons. They defend that everything was set up for them, evidence such as photos and correspondence, photoshopped on the Sky app, and DNA traces planted in the slaughterhouse.
While the prosecutor reads the crimes he accuses them of, the leaders and members of the clan, placed behind the bulletproof glass, giggle, mumble, get bored, yawn, and when the brutal mutilations of the victims are highlighted, they can even doze off.
They claim that the cooperating witnesses are lying, because they were bribed with agreements on a significant reduction of sentences. All three cooperating witnesses admit their guilt. They were gang members too.
As the weekly "Vreme" already wrote, the first witness Bojan Hrvatin is certainly useful. However, he only has indirect knowledge, everything he knows he heard from the gang members who went to the slaughterhouse. The problem is that he was released from prison, where he was imprisoned for drug trafficking, only on May 28, 2020. That's when he joined the gang, so he can only testify about the murders that happened after that. Witness Nikola Spasojević also has circumstantial knowledge; by the way, he had nervous breakdowns several times because of the threats he was exposed to.
The third witness, Srđan Lalić, could be key to convicting the defendants. He has personally participated in numerous murders and has been part of the very heart of the clan since the beginning. He calculates callously and he certainly won't risk keeping something quiet and losing the deal that he will only be responsible for all crimes for 18 years in prison.
No one yet knows what Lalić told the prosecution. The defendants also shy away from him, and said that they will not comment on anything related to him until they find out what he has decided to testify about.
THE COURT ROOM IS NOT A TRIBUNE
The conclusion of the agreement between the Prosecutor's Office and Srđan Lalić, also known as the "butcher with a smile", is another big blow for the clan.
The first blow came when they arrested their lawyer Dejan Lazarevic, suspected of participating in crime together with the clan of drug lord Darko Saric. Since then, the members of the clan persistently repeat the defense they prepared with the defense attorney Lazarevic and seem quite left to their own devices. So they happen to say like Velja Nevolja to the judge: "We can only fight like this when we go on stage."
He himself soon realized that it was not a stage, nor a stadium tribune, but a courtroom in front of which he would be able to speak for some time, and then he would be threatened with going behind the prison walls, forever.
Without the initially chosen lawyer, with an increasing number of witnesses, and thus an increasing number of murders that are blamed on them, the clan sounds more and more like the line from the song "the circus is leaving our small town".
Clan leaders insist that they were members of the ruling Serbian Progressive Party and that they often worked for the government and at the behest of state and police officials. As examples, they state that for the government, as hooligan groups, first "Janjičari", then "Principi", unfurled or removed banners from fan stands, secured rallies and broke up protests. They do not provide evidence for everything they say, nor do they describe the events in more detail, and they also forget that they are not being tried for violent behavior. They are not tried as hooligans, but as drug dealers and members of an organized criminal group, accused of numerous murders and massacring of victims.
They also claim that together with the Kosovo criminal Zvonko Veselinović, and on the order of Belgrade Police Chief Veselin Milić, in April 2016, they illegally demolished a part of the city in Savamala. This is already a question that should be resolved by the Higher Public Prosecutor's Office in Belgrade, since it is handling the proceedings for Savamala. However, until the conclusion of this issue of the weekly "Vreme", they did not announce themselves from that prosecution.
BLACKMAIL POTENTIAL
It is noticeable that the leaders of the clan call out ruling politicians and current state officials who advocated or participated in their arrest, while not even mentioning those who were speculated for years to be their protectors.
Velja Nevolja and Mare Mesar do not even give a logical explanation as to why the political authority with which they emphasize their closeness, if it has protected them for so long, as they say, would accommodate everything to them. Their performances and accusations, unsupported by evidence, are easily put aside because of the legal regulations that the accused have the right to lie, if it benefits them in their defense.
Although it is obvious that the "Principi" hooligan group, which is now called the Belivuk-Miljković criminal clan, is actually a mirror of the corruption of the state system and the criminalization of parts of the security structures and the judiciary in Serbia, not even the prosecutor's office handling this case dealt with the clan's connection with state representatives in more detail. .
All this leaves the clan room for some kind of maneuver and possible blackmail potential. It's as if they are not yet aware that their life sentence is very certain while the evidence is piling up and new ones are still surfacing. Belivuk and Miljković, once the masters of life and death, while walking towards the courtroom, with a firm gait and emphasis on shoulders and muscles, may not have put two and two together yet. Accustomed to going unpunished for years, it seems that their hope of getting out of prison in their lifetime will be the last to die. They behave like a boy who cries: Wolf, wolf... and once, if they want to tell the truth, there may not be anyone who will be there to hear them or believe them after the defense they started to make.
"IT IS WEIRD WHEN I SEE A LIVING MAN"
Photo: Rade Prelić / TanjugVeljko Belivuk
At the time when this text is being written for "Vreme", before going to the printing press, there are still a few hours left until Marko Miljković's defense is presented. At the moment, it is not known what he will talk about, but it is expected that, in accordance with his nature, he will send the most difficult messages to the public.
Namely, this is how one of the cooperating witnesses described Miljković to the prosecution: "Miljković devised scams that trapped the victims. What can be said about how they would be lured, to which locations, who among the 'soldiers' kidnaps them and transports them to the house of horrors in the Ritopek neighborhood of Belgrade. From start to finish, everything was a ferocious logistical brainchild of Mark Mesar."
How cruel he is is shown by the message cited in the indictment, in which Miljković writes to an unknown person via Sky: "I have to rest for a while on the way, I'll relax, brother! I only bleat with corpses, it's strange to me when I see a living man."
Bojan Hrvatin, a member of the clan, says: "Miljković said that he is not really interested in the (Partizan's) tribune." That he is more interested in those street jobs, but not with drugs. He is only interested in matters related to the planning of murders."
Miljković had a large collection of photos of massacred people in his phone. These were not only the victims of his group and Belivuk's group, but he also kept pictures of the victims of other clans. Hrvatin revealed to the prosecution that Miljković showed him pictures of decapitated members of their clan, the Kavački clan, who were killed by a rival clan.
"He liked to keep pictures in his phone, I don't know why, but he liked it and he had a phone full of those pictures. He had pictures that (members of other clans) did against, so they sent them to us. The whole body with the head cut off, he showed me that specific picture and said that it was not us who did it, but the Škaljarci group," Hrvatin said in his testimony.
It was Miljković's need to perpetuate the brutality that ultimately provided the key evidence against the clan.
To outplay a rival and bring him into the clan - that's what a Hrvatin testified for, "Miljković was a magician". For example, he took mobile phones from the victims, and then he would impersonate himself and correspond with rival associates. So the Butcher would learn something new and create a scenario to lure the next victim.
Through the Sky application, he corresponded with a rival group - the Skaljar clan. Falsely presenting himself as their member, he enabled Velja's group to kidnap the influential skalator Milo Radulović, known as the Captain, in Montenegro. The indictment states that the Captain was then used to lure more victims.
"DO YOU FEEL NORMAL?... "
The information and the chronology of events show that the police were not interested in all the atrocities committed by the clan for years. Instead of following them, the police services actually kept their victims "on measures" of wiretapping and monitoring. And so until six months before the arrest, when an investigation was launched against Belivuk and Miljković. More precisely, until the world's secret services began to piece together evidence from the secret phone communication application Sky; until photos and messages started pouring in with descriptions of how members of rival clans were massacred in the slaughterhouse in Ritopek. According to the indictment, Marko Miljković regularly sent photographs of atrocities to an anonymous person, who is suspected to be the leader of the Kavac clan, Radoje Zvicer, with the message: "They were all executioners, not some civilians."
Belivuk himself, wanting to take the blame off himself, points out the responsibility of the MUP and the BIA.
"They put bugs, cameras everywhere, they knew what we do in the toilet, when we have relations with women, and besides all that, we killed six people?" Belivuk asked, and then said that the Prosecutor's Office should also arrest those members of the police. because they did not react.
"Is it normal for you that they let us kill so many people, and then let us go by plane to Montenegro?" Belivuk asked the judge, alluding to the trip when they went to visit Radoj Zvicer, allegedly the leader of the Kavački clan. .
On that occasion, upon their return to Serbia, they were detained and released. The mentioned trip happened a few days before they were arrested in a major operation by the BIA and MUP.
NO ONE WENT TO RITOPEK OF THEIR OWN WILL
When they talk about their connections with the powerful, neither Belivuk nor Miljković mention whether they had collaborators in the police who protected them even before the investigation was launched against them, while people entered through the secret room in Ritopek, but never more, in their lifetime, came out.
Namely, during 2019 and 2020, the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Serbia boasted that the number of criminal murders in Belgrade had been reduced to a minimum and that the statistics had "never been better". It is important to say that no statistics deal with missing persons. Right then, dozens of people were abducted and brutally murdered in Ritopek. The families of the victims complain that when they reported the disappearance of their loved ones, they were treated very roughly by the police and that they had the impression that no one was even looking for them. Neither criminal inspectors, nor the Prosecutor's Office.
Around that period, the "Tijana Jurić" Foundation also launched a website for missing persons, and announcements from that page were regularly sent to the media. This bothered the Ministry of Internal Affairs, as evidenced by the announcement they put on the official website of the Government of Serbia on August 30, 2020. The statement was signed by Milan Davidović, then head of the General Crime Suppression Department of the Criminal Police Directorate of the Ministry of Interior of Serbia. Part of the statement reads, among other things:
"Kidnappings are extremely rare in our country and the police solve them efficiently, promptly and without delay. If we are talking about a potential criminal act, the police, in cooperation with the Prosecutor's Office, immediately undertakes all emergency measures available to it. Also, if the police, in cooperation with the Prosecutor's Office, deem it necessary to publish a photograph of a missing person, and it is related to a committed criminal act, we inevitably do so immediately and alert the public.
Often, unfortunately, speaks in public about the huge number of missing persons, adult citizens, which absolutely does not correspond to the truth. This creates a false sense of insecurity and misleads citizens. When it comes to the disappearance of adults, it is mostly about people who left their homes of their own free will and do not want to be publicly exposed in any way."
Let us remind you that in August 2020, on the eve of this announcement, on Wednesday, August 5, the disappearance of Goran Veličković Goksi (33), the leader of the Partizan fan group gathered under the banner "Partizanovci", was reported to the police department of the city of Belgrade. Then, on August 10th of the same year - and on the same day the case was reported - Nikola Mitic disappeared. It turns out, both of them were kidnapped and ended up in Ritopek, as victims of the clan.
Who in the police led those investigations, how so many omissions were made, the Prosecutor's Office was never interested. It will be interesting to hear if the Prosecution, for example, will ask the associate witness Srđan Lalić who the clan learned to do counter-escorting while following the victim or abducting people. Or who in the police spread false information that Belivuk was captured by the Skaljar clan so that victims like Lazar Vukićević could be more easily trapped.
Criminals come and go. However, if the Serbian judiciary does not deal with the protectors of the clans, new times will bring new criminal acts.
