It is a mystery how and why exactly now Luka Bojović, designated as the leader of the New Zemun clan, is released from a Spanish prison - he was arrested in February 2012 in Valencia and sentenced to 18 years for possession of weapons, around 600.000 euros in an apartment and a forged passport. Two-thirds of his sentence expires in February 2024, but allegedly the Spaniards decided to deport him to Serbia before then. It is not known on the basis of which legal remedy they made such a decision.
In the meantime, Bojović was acquitted of all charges in Serbia and is a free man. However, upon arrival, he will have to go to the police - his passport has expired, and the Belgrade police announce that they will call Luka for an interview and warn him that his safety is at risk. Nevertheless, in recent years, on the eve of Bojović's return, that police was diligent and arrested most of his enemies, groups close to the Kavački clan, such as Belivuk's group and witch doctors...
At the moment when Luka Bojović returns, there is no one in Serbia at the head of the Security and Information Agency, there is no director of the police, and all repressive power is concentrated at the top of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. It is led by Bratislav Gašić, until recently the head of the BIA, who actively participated in the arrest of Bojović's enemies. And just the other day, when it became known about the return of Luka Bojović, the news suddenly appeared in the media that the former state secretary of the MUP, Dijana Hrkalović, was seriously ill, and that it would be best if she continued her treatment somewhere abroad, far from here... Let's remind , Hrkalović was accused of manipulating evidence in favor of Bojović's enemies, but also of being aware of information about the escort and wiretapping of his closest associates, who were soon after killed.
THE BEGINNING AND THE FALL INTO HAD
As soon as he stepped into adult life, Luka Bojović headed to the world of the dead. In other words, he lived among the corpses scattered around the battlefield and the Belgrade crime scene. In the fall of 1991, Luka Bojović, who had just come of age from Belgrade, as his father said, fed up with warmongering propaganda, left home to fight for "Serbdom" on the territory of the former SFRY. Bojović signed up as a volunteer in the Croatian town of Erdut and joined the paramilitary formation of the Serbian Volunteer Guard, which was commanded by Željko Ražnatović Arkan, a criminal and one of the most famous collaborators of the State Security. Bojović found a "comrade to the grave", Radet Rakonjec, on the battlefield, and he also proved his loyalty to his commander, which is probably why he received the rank of second lieutenant of the Serbian Volunteer Guard from Arkan when he was only 19 years old.
"Luka became a second lieutenant of the SDG when he was just 19 years old. At that time, wars flared up on the territory of Croatia and Bosnia, and the SDG was a recognized Serbian unit, which, although it was not officialised, was recognized. When both the general of the police and the general of the army come to Commander Arkan and ask for help in the form of 10 people or 150 people, it is clear that it is an official Serbian unit," said Rakonjac on the show "Goli život". "At that moment, Luka Bojović was the youngest Serbian officer, and to get a rank in such a unit, at such a young age... Well, the commander didn't hand out ranks with a shovel," Rakonjac added. "He also went to Kosovo during the NATO bombing. There were about forty of us there for more than two months."
Apart from Arkan, Luka was also led by his deputy Milorad Ulemek Legija in the battles on the territory of the former SFRY. The whirlwind of war intertwined the fates of those people outside the front.
Luka Bojović's father looked more bitterly at that period of his son's life and pointed out in interviews that Luka went to the battlefield in Croatia for the first time on his own accord, but that he fought on the territory of BiH and Kosovo on the orders of the notorious State Security.
And when he returned from the battlefield, Luka would not part with his weapon. Thus, in the beginning of the nineties, in the center of Belgrade, he wounded Mihajlo Divac, a well-known criminal at the time, in the "Trozubac" tavern. The conflict arose because of a dark look - it was a kind of invitation to a duel. Mihajlo Divac described the wounding and confrontation with Luka Bojović in "Trident" in the cult film "See you in obituary".
"I reacted when he looked at me, fuck, so provocatively. Then I got up and walked towards him. He got up too. I took two or three steps, and he shot at me from four or five meters. The first bullet hit me in the stomach, I was still going; the second bullet went through my arm and stomach, I was still walking towards him. Then I said to him: 'Kid, I'm going to stick that mouth in your ass, you understand.' What did I need? This one shot me, this p..cat, and what did I need?!", Divac asks in the film.
During the 1998s, Bojović's name was also associated with a shooting at the "Trezor" discotheque. He was taken into custody for illegal carrying of weapons, then, according to media reports, in XNUMX he was sentenced to three months in prison for attacking a police officer. However, he did not serve that sentence, since, as the tabloids wrote, the then president of Serbia, Milan Milutinović, decided to pardon him.
Luka's friend Rade Rakonjac also stated that when they were not at war, Arkan hired them to be his children's bodyguards, and that this was their basic occupation in peacetime conditions.
And then, in January 2000, there was a change in the underground, Arkan was killed in a Belgrade hotel. Allegedly, his murder was arranged by the heads of most of the smaller Serbian clans because they could no longer tolerate the racket they were giving him. According to a more realistic version, the clans were joined in the conspiracy to kill Arkan by the State Security, the same one that later gave the order to the Legion and the Zemun clan to sanctify his death. It was a tried-and-tested recipe of the Service to divide and provoke a criminal war, so that the bad guys, like puppets on a string, kill each other when their DB ID expires. In the meantime, there was a change of political power and changes on October 5, 2000.
Nevertheless, the criminal war continued, and Legija and Zemunci became masters of the asphalt and went wild, until in March 2003 they killed Prime Minister Zoran Đinđić. First, the Saber action was launched, and the democrats cleaned the wheat from the chaff and filled the detention centers, at the same time there was a one-year lull in criminal confrontations. Bojović is not mentioned in those years, he remained invisible, like a new generation, which was waiting to take over the field after all the storms and lulls.
CROISSANTS FOR BREAKFAST, HECKLERS FOR DINNER
Luka Bojović became a young businessman and opened a bakery with always fresh bread and croissants in the heart of Vračar. However, according to the testimonies of his relatives, the inspection did not give him peace and soon they explained to him that "there is no bread from bread". They punished him almost every day, the reason would be, for example, the muffin is heavier than the standard prescribes... According to the claims of police officials, Bojović soon, instead of the test, took up arms again. He was declared the leader of the New Zemun clan, and was accused of hiding the murderers of Prime Minister Djindjic, but also continued to liquidate people from the list marked as conspirators in the murder of Arkan. The Serbian police arrested him on September 22, 2007, on suspicion of hiding members of the Zemun clan. He was in custody until April 2008, and when he was released, he showed a wide smile and raised three fingers to the photo-reporters present in front of the District Prison. However, he was charged with illegal possession of weapons and falsification of documents. He was sentenced to 2009 months in prison in 15 for this crime, but was released on bail.
Bojović was later accused of multiple murders and attempted murders. He was also accused of being the organizer of the murder of Branko Jeftović Jorge in 2004, the attempted liquidation of Andrija Drašković and Zoran Nedović Šok in the same year when their bodyguards Dejan Živančević and Milutin Jovičić were killed. All these crimes were carried out according to the recipe of the Zemun clan, the victims were shot from a moving car or were liquidated in the middle of the street - the bullets were fired almost in passing.
The prosecution for organized crime stated in the indictment that Bojović became the head of the Zemun clan after the murder of its leaders Dušan Spasojević and Mile Luković in March 2003, and that he consolidated his power after the arrest of Milorad Ulemek Legija. After a lengthy court proceeding, full of controversies, Luka Bojović was legally acquitted of all charges. He was tried in absentia, mostly while in prison in Spain.
The court proceedings against Bojović were marked by the disqualification of the prosecutor in the proceedings, the request of Luka's defense attorneys, who claimed that the prosecution had manipulated the evidence, was accepted. Allegedly, the prosecutor did not present the letters found in Bojović's apartment in Spain, in which the defendant agreed with the lawyer how the witnesses, including Miloš Simović, would change their statements and testify in his favor, as evidence, but waited for an opportune moment. to present them before the court panel. And while Sretko Kalinić testified that he killed on Bojović's order, another member of the Zemun community claimed that Kalinić killed on his own initiative and that Luka was completely innocent. Because of that trial, Serbia demanded the extradition of Bojović from Spain. According to Luka's defenders, the Serbian police and judiciary claimed to the Spaniards that Luka Bojović was the murderer, and replaced his DNA with the DNA of the notorious Sretko Kalinić found on one of the weapons used in the crime. In 2014, Bojović personally called the Serbian media from a Spanish prison and told that the police had faked his DNA.
"Serbian Interpol sent fake DNA to the Spaniards claiming it was mine. Their goal in the Serbian police is not the truth, but only to make a fuss," said Bojović at the time.
After that, Spain accepted Bojović's request not to extradite him to Serbia, because he does not believe that he will have a fair trial there. Nevertheless, the Serbian court acquitted him, led by a panel of judges, whose decisions left the public stunned more than once.
In Spain, Luka Bojović was acquitted for the murder of a fugitive member of the Zemun clan, Milan Jurišić. According to the indictment, between March 5 and 6, 2009, in Madrid, Bojović managed to take a hammer that Jurišić, with whom he had an argument, kept next to his bed, and when Jurišić got out of the shower and passed by the living room, Bojović got up and hit him four or five times on the back and head, which caused Jurišić's death. According to the prosecutor, Jurišić was on his knees screaming and begging for mercy, and then he was killed. The defendants took the body to the kitchen, dismembered it and put it wrapped in paper and bags in the refrigerator. The next day, they crushed the pieces with an electric machine that was broken by the bullet that Jurišić was carrying in his body due to an earlier wound. They allegedly threw the chopped pieces into the toilet. The prosecutor added that they also acquired a saw with which they cut the victim's bones and broke his head with a hammer.
According to the prosecutor, Sretko Kalinic, who left Spain a few days later, and who is also responsible for the murder of Djindjic, was responsible for throwing the remains into the Manzanares River from the Queen Victoria Bridge in Madrid. The judicial panel of the Spanish court acquitted Bojović because the statements of the witnesses did not match and his role in the murder of Jurišić could not be proven beyond doubt.
ENEMY OF THE STATE NO. 1
After he was released from detention in Belgrade in 2008, the most turbulent period of Bojović's life began. The media constantly wrote about his allegedly criminal activities, and police officials and politicians publicly called him names and accused him. How he lived and earned money remained a secret that the court proceedings did not reveal. He moved his wife and children to Spain, where they opened a pastry shop in a fashionable resort. Luka was in Serbia until 2010, and then, a few days after the arrest of Zemun citizens Sretko Kalinić and Miloš Simović, he also left. Then an Interpol warrant was issued for him.
Otherwise, his every move caused new chaos, both in the underground and on the political scene. Namely, in the autumn of 2010, the then leader of the Serbian Progressive Party and the leader of the opposition, Tomislav Nikolić, accused Luka Bojović of preparing to assassinate him on the orders of Vojislav Šešelj from The Hague. Allegedly, Šešelj wanted to take revenge on Nikolic because he left the Serbian Radical Party and founded SNS with Vučić.
The current president of Serbia, Aleksandar Vučić, and then one of the leaders of the progressives, told the media in September 2010: "If you ask me if it is possible for this to happen, I will say that it is not impossible. There is a well-founded suspicion that Šešelj ordered it, and that Bojović should have carried it out."
The BIA also confirmed that there is information about the preparation of Nikolić's liquidation, without revealing anything more about it. As the weekly "Vreme" learns, the information that Šešelj ordered the murder of Nikolić from Luka Bojović was given to Serbian investigators by Miloš Simović, shortly after he was arrested.
And then, a few months before the elections and the change of government in Serbia, in February 2012, but shortly after the arrest of Luka Bojović in Spain, Aleksandar Vučić once again opened the topic of "the first Serbian criminal Bojović" in public. As the deputy head of SNS, he said that he will reveal to the public who warned Luka Bojović to leave the country back in 2008. Allegedly, he informed the special prosecutor for organized crime Miljko Radisavljević about everything in a letter that one of the highest state officials met with Luka Bojović immediately before his escape from Serbia. According to the claims of the progressives, in that letter Vučić "clearly emphasized" the name and surname of that official who met with Bojović at the end of 2008 in the cafe "Prive" at Njegoševa 63, just before his escape, and that a person who was on welfare testified about this penalties.
The Serbian bazaar stirred and began to speculate that the mysterious politician was actually the former police minister and SPS leader Ivica Dačić. However, when asked by the journalist if he was talking about the Minister of Interior Ivica Dacic, Vučić did not want to answer that question.
"I will wait for the conversation with the prosecutor and then either he or I will answer you," said Vučić.
Photo: Srđan Ilić / TanjugDECLARED THE PORT OF BOJOVIĆ AS STATE ENEMY NUMBER 1: A. Vučić and T. Nikolić
However, the Special Prosecutor's Office then told the media that Vučić still did not reveal the name of that mysterious politician to them. After a few months, the Serbian Progressive Party won the elections in Serbia and entered a coalition with Ivica Dacic and the Socialists, with whom it is still in power today. And Luka Bojović went from being the first enemy of the opposition to becoming the first enemy of the government.
Namely, when the SNS took over the police in 2014 with the then minister Nebojša Stefanović at the head and his closest associate Dijana Hrkalović, the Luka Bojović clan was declared the most dangerous criminal association ever. They were the first on the lists to be shot, arrested and wanted, until the rival Belivuk clan was arrested and the biggest shame of the Serbian police was revealed - in the house of terror in Ritopek, dozens of people were tortured, killed and massacred, some ended up with messages carved with a knife on their backs, which indicated that they were victims of revenge against the Bojović clan.
AN EYE FOR AN EYE AND BROTHER FOR BROTHER
Immediately before escaping from Serbia, according to media reports, Luka Bojović started a war with the Montenegrin Saranović brothers. Soon, the front opened along Serbia and Montenegro, and the confrontation came down to revenge based on the principle of "an eye for an eye, brother for brother".
At the end of July 2009, Slobodan Radonjić (30), the godfather of Slobodan and Branislav Šaranović, disappeared. According to security information, the missing young man owed money for a kilogram of drugs to Filip Korac, Bojović's right-hand man. He was last seen getting into the car of Luka Đurović, the leader of the criminal group from Bar and the main associate of Luka Bojović in Montenegro. The disappearance of young Radonjić, who is believed to have been killed (the body was not found), started a war between the Šaranović family and Luka Bojović, in which there were at least fifteen victims on both sides in the following decade.
In October 2009, two and a half months after the disappearance of Slobodan Radonjić, Branislav Šaranović was killed. While he was approaching his house on Dedinja in his vehicle, two guys with hoods suddenly approached him on a scooter. They waited for him to park the car and get out, and then, while he was crossing the street, they shot him cursing: "Majku li ti j..."; they hit Šaranović from the heckler.
The death of Brana Šaranović was a blow from which his brother Slobodan could not recover. A few months later, at the end of 2009, he publicly announced a reward of one million euros for information about the crime, and such posters were plastered all over the city. Then, the father of the missing young man and his bodyguard were killed in the mafia shelter in the center of Zemun.
Arrest of Luka Bojovic in Spain. 02.2012.TV footage of the arrest of Luka Bojović in 2012.
Meanwhile, in February 2012, Luka Bojović was arrested in Spain. In the prison there, he encountered the most difficult news from Serbia. Namely, in the spring of 2013, his own brother Nikola Bojović was killed in the center of Belgrade, as a victim of blood feud. Soon, Luka's former comrade and best friend Rade Rakonjac was also liquidated, and the bloody streak continued...
Slobodan Šaranović was arrested in 2014 in Montenegro on suspicion of ordering the murder of Nikola Bojović as revenge for the murder of his brother Branislav. Although Serbia conducted an investigation into the same murder almost at the same time, Montenegro did not extradite him, and he spent more than two years in custody.
Slobodan Šaranović (78) was killed in front of his house in Budva in March 2017. The university professor, Luka Bojović's mother, was soon arrested and spent some time in custody. She was suspected of being in Montenegro, personally from her car, monitoring the house of one of the participants in the murder of her son Nikola with binoculars.
HE LEAD TWO MAFIA WARS FROM PRISON
photo: Aleksandar StankovićBLOOD REVENGE: The place where Luka Bojović's brother, Nikola, was killed
According to his mother, Luka Bojović spent his prison days painting. The family claims that the pictures are good and that he showed that he had the talent to paint a story on canvas. At the same time, while Luka was spilling colors in his cell, blood was being spilled on the streets of Serbia, Montenegro, and often in Europe during the war between the Kavački and Škaljar clans.
Namely, the war with the Šaranović family had not yet ended when the Bojović clan entered into a new conflict in 2015. Cooperating with the Skaljars, Luka Bojović and his team fought with the Kavčans, led by Radoje Zvicer, as well as with their collaborators such as Salet Mutavo, the Belivuk clan and the recently arrested witch doctors. However, it was not just a war of cartels against cartels. The Škaljars and the Bojovićs were also targeted by state structures, since everything indicates that certain state officials, the police of Serbia and Montenegro, favored the Kavački clan. People close to Luka Bojović were arrested more often, but also killed more often during that war.
One of Luka's closest associates, Filip Korać, is a man suspected of being connected to the 2016 murder of Aleksandar Stanković, aka Sale Mutavi. Since then, he has been the target of murderers several times, and the tabloids have written about him as the number one criminal problem. He was labeled as the leader of the rebellion during the 2017 derby, when, as is speculated, he led a horde of hooligans from Split to Partizan's stadium who clashed with Belivuk's team. The people of Split lost that battle, and Filip Korać disappeared in an unknown direction. After the murder of Blaža Đurović in March 2018 in Dušanovac in Belgrade, the Higher Public Prosecutor's Office launched an investigation against Korać on the suspicion that he incited the aforementioned liquidation. That was the reason for Serbia to issue an Interpol warrant for Filip Korac. The investigation was nevertheless suspended, and in January 2020, the warrant for him was withdrawn. It seemed that, according to the information he received from the police, this angered the President of the country, Aleksandar Vučić.
"I'm not going to tell you that the main supplier of drugs, everything everywhere, is not guilty of anything. And always will be. When you have him behind the involvement in the murders, and now I know that I will be criticized, someone will appear in the prosecutor's office to say: 'Well, yes, but the procedural requirements are not fully met and we cannot give the status of a witness-collaborator to a man who says that Filip Korać paid him for the murder and that he was the one who did it,'" said Vucic at the time at a press conference.
What speaks of the direct connection of state structures with mafia liquidations is the fact that the Kavčani, Belivuk's men and witch doctors were untouchable for years, the police ignored all their crimes. Well, no one thought of following and eavesdropping on them until a few months before their arrest. And the policemen who would dare to investigate or arrest them would be persecuted, arrested, replaced and satanized by the media if they were collaborators of the Bojović clan, like inspector Dejan Jović.
Let us remind you that the media satanization, when Inspector Jović was arrested in a staged trial, according to the editor of the tabloid, was ordered by the former MUP State Secretary Dijana Hrkalović. At the same time, almost all the victims close to Bojović immediately before the liquidations were followed and eavesdropped.
Lawyer Dragoslav Ognjanović was also followed and eavesdropped from May 2018, when, in a pizzeria in Vračar, he met with a person who was already under police surveillance, Bojović's godfather, Dragoslav Galeta Miloradović. During that meeting, as stated in the indictment charging Hrkalović with influence peddling, they talked about Diana. Among other things, how he removes the evidence for murder cases committed by the Belivuk clan. The former secretary of state is accused of ordering the removal of parts of recordings and transcripts that mention her. By the way, a few days after that conversation was recorded, Dragoslav Miloradović was killed in front of his car wash in Mirijevo, and a few months later, the lawyer Dragoslav Ognjanović was also killed. Despite the statements of numerous witnesses of the defendants, after the arrest of Belivuk, the murderers of Miloradović and Ognjanović have not been found to this day.
Radical leader Vojislav Šešelj, the same one who was said to have once ordered the murder of Tomislav Nikolić through Bojović, read parts of the transcripts of Ognjanović and Miloradović on Pink Television last September. Seselj then claimed that Dragoslav Miloradović Gale was Luka Bojović's most trusted man, and that together with lawyer Ognjanović, he possessed evidence of all the criminal acts of Nebojša Stefanović and his late father Branko Stefanović. Precisely because of this, as Seselj publicly accused, Stefanović ordered Dijana Hrkalović to organize the murder of lawyer Miša Ognjanović, in order to prevent the public publication of compromising documents about him and his father. However, the Prosecutor's Office ignored Seselj.
An even bigger public shock occurred when Hrkalović, after being released from custody, accused former police minister Nebojša Stefanović of a series of other criminal acts. At that time, the Department of Internal Control of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, on the order of the Prosecutor's Office, interrogated Stefanović. However, many media understood the fact that Nebojša Stefanović entered the SUK building in the company of lawyer Goran Pejić, who was a friend of lawyer Dragoslav Miša Ognjanović and shared an office with him until Ognjanović was killed in July. in 2018
What will Luka Bojović do after prison in Spain? Was it because of some "special task" that he got out of prison two years earlier, before he had served two-thirds of his sentence and thus became eligible for early release? Certainly, he is now a free man, but also one of the most experienced in the criminal world in the Balkans. He has more experience in cooperation with the DB than any boss currently employed in the BIA, and he does not lack skills in war conflicts. However, he does not lack enemies. Certain sources of "Vremen" claim that he is coming to Serbia to get his passport and to visit the graves, and that he will then head... Somewhere, to warmer regions... Others speculate that it could become someone's new "special operations" project.
