April 18, 2017
The 18th anniversary of the murder of Slavko Ćuruvija, owner and editor of newspapers Dnevni telegraf and Evropljanin, has been marked at the site where he was shot down on 11th April 1999.
The indictment, which defined the murder as being politically motivated and was brought against four former officers of the State Security Services, was only filed in 2014, with the trial beginning in June 2015.
Not even all prosecution witnesses have been heard over the course of these two years. According to the assessments of lawyers, if hearings continue at the same pace, a first instance judgement will not even be brought in the year ahead.
During the April hearing, the court heard the testimony of Dušan Mihajlović, who was interior minister in the first democratic government following the change of the Slobodan Milošević regime in 2001, in the first years of this murder’s investigation.
His testimony, though long awaited, did not reveal anything new – reporters following the trial noted that during the two days of his testimony Mihajlović uttered the words “I don’t know” and “I don’t remember” a hundred times.
