August 2, 2018
After causing public excitement in June with his disappearance, and then later being physically attacked, Serbian journalist Stefan Cvetković now claims that shots were fired at a car that he was driving.
Cvetković said that he was driving near Bela Crkva, his hometown which is located 90 kilometres east of Belgrade, when someone from the car behind opened fire on his car using an automatic weapon. Neither he nor his companion were injured in this attack.
The higher public prosecutor’s office in the nearby town of Pančevo said that no damage or bullet holes were detected on Cvetković’s car, and that the journalist had refused to take a lie detector test. Cvetković dismissed the prosecution’s statement as a “notorious lie”, pointing out that the police had examined his father’s car instead of his.
Major police forces were mobilised in response to Cvetković’s disappearance in June, only for him to appear two days later claiming to have been kidnapped. Doubts in his version of events led to the prosecution filing criminal charges against him for false reporting. Cvetković was then physically attacked last month in the centre of Bela Crkva, sustaining head injuries, after which police arrested the attacker.
Following the most recent attack, in which he claims that a weapon was used, Cvetković stated that a possible reason why he is being put through this “torture” could be the fact that he was investigating the case of the murder of the Kosovo-Serb politician Oliver Ivanovic.
