The scandal related to the first-instance verdict for attempted terrorism in October 2016 speaks of the complete collapse of the Montenegrin judiciary, and it is the last moment to change things in the judiciary as soon as possible, said MP Jovan Vučurović of the New Serbian Democracy (NSD).
"There are still people in the Special State Prosecutor's Office (SDT), prosecutors' offices, the High Court, the Judicial Council, who did dirty work like this for the former regime," said Vučurović to "Vijesta".
"Vijesti" today published transcripts from the encrypted Sky application, according to which the alleged members of the police drug cartel, Petar Lazović and Ljubo Milović, said that they cannot lack money just to confirm the first-instance verdict of the High Court from 2019 in the "coup d'etat" case.
The verdict, by which 13 defendants accused of attempted terrorism on the day of the parliamentary elections in 2016 were sentenced to almost 70 years in prison, was annulled by the Court of Appeal in early 2021.
The annulled verdict includes the leader of the New Serbian Democracy, the current president of the Parliament of Montenegro Andrija Mandić and the leader of the Democratic People's Party (DNP) Milan Knežević. They were sentenced to five years in prison each, for, as it is written in the indictment, membership in a criminal organization since February 2016. The organizers of that group - Russians Eduard Šišmakov and Vladimir Popov - were sentenced to a total of 27 years in prison.
Vučurović points out that the whole of Montenegro knew that it was a staged, political process and confrontation with the then Democratic Front (DF) and its leaders.
"It is also clear that the top of the former regime, the mafia and criminal circles from the SDT, the courts, the police and the National Security Agency were behind everything," Vučurović said.
He added that when such evidence emerges, the prosecution must react, because seven years of destroyed political and private life cannot just be returned to Andrija Mandić, Milan Knežević, Mihail Čađenović and others who were in custody.
"We are now convinced that the first-instance verdict was 'oiled' in a similar way and that there was no monetary upper limit for the sale of such a verdict. Our coalition was the most dangerous opponent of the mafia and the former regime, and that is why we are under such an attack by those structures, but they failed to break us. And because of that, and for the sake of Montenegro and its citizens, we remain consistent fighters against organized crime and we expect that fight to be a triumph of justice and truth," said Vučurović.
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