Longer period of time journalist Oliver Lakić they were followed by members of an organized criminal group Milan Vujotić, before, on the night of May 8, 2018, they waited for her in front of the building where she lives and shot her in the leg. While the investigation into that attack was ongoing, her liquidation was also ordered in the prison, claims the Special State Prosecutor's Office (SDT), which was prevented because the potential killer Bajram Pista changed his mind and offered to cooperate with the police.
According to the indictment of the SDT, the trial before the Council of Judges Igor Đuričković in the High Court in Podgorica should start today, five years and seven months after the journalist was shot.
The indictment cites the alleged statements of the accused members of the criminal organization that she "saw something she shouldn't have, got involved in something" and that she was "a lot of trouble".
Special prosecutor Nataša Bosković processed the indictment for the Lakić case together with the murder Miodrag Kruščić which happened forty days after the attack on the journalist, stating that the criminal clan of Milan Vujotić was behind both crimes. A total of 14 people were charged, and illegal possession of weapons and drug smuggling are among the crimes they are charged with.
When it comes to the part of the indictment that concerns the wounding of Lakić, it states that he shot the journalist Filip Knezevic (35), that he drove it that evening Filip Bešović (34), and that in her monitoring, which lasted "at least a week", Knežević and Goran Rakočević (39) Luka Bulatović (27) and Veselin Bubanja (36). Knežević and Bešović are therefore accused of having committed the criminal offense of causing grievous bodily harm, and Rakočević, Bulatović and Bubanja as their co-perpetrators.
Because of the subsequent encouragement of Bajram Pista to kill the journalist Lakić, while they were together in ZIKS, Rakočević and Bešović are charged with the criminal offense of murder by incitement, while Knežević is also charged with illegal possession of weapons. During the investigation into this and other criminal acts, the accused denied their guilt.
The Special State Prosecutor's Office sees the motive for wounding and planning the murder of Olivera Lakić in her investigative texts, although the defendants were not mentioned in them, nor were they linked to any of the crimes she wrote about. Thus, it remained unclear who was behind the attack, that is, who hired the members of the criminal organization to wound and intimidate the journalist who had already been beaten and threatened several times. As well as why they wanted to kill her afterwards.
According to the indictment, the journalist was followed "for a period not shorter than seven days", while she was in her apartment, that is, when she went to the "Vijesti" newsroom, where she worked at the time. The Prosecution supports its claims from the indictment with three types of evidence: lists of mobile communications that show that the suspects were moving where the journalist was. Another source of evidence is their encrypted phone correspondence, for which evidence was obtained through international legal assistance from France. And finally, there is the testimony of the associate witness. Bajram Pista told the police that the attack on Lakić was organized, and that he was then offered 150 euros to kill the journalist after he was released from prison.
The facts point to the tobacco mafia, but...
The media community expects a lot from this trial, first of all to find the perpetrators. Because until this is determined, there is no environment in which Olivera Lakić, and all those who investigate organized crime and high corruption, will do their work without fear. Journalist Lakić has been living with a police escort for years, after the highest state officials and the State Prosecutor's Office did not respond adequately to the first attacks and threats. And most of them followed her journalistic investigation and articles about organized cigarette smuggling.
The Police Directorate did not answer whether they had recently re-assessed her security and whether the journalist was still at risk, given that, according to the claims of associate witnesses, 150.000 euros were offered for her murder. True, the police then boasted that they had prevented the murder, but since the perpetrators are not known, it is not known whether the danger has ended.
In the SDT indictment, the journalist's statement about the events of the day when she was shot is reported. She said that she left the editing room around 20 p.m., that she drove her colleague to the neighborhood where she lives and returned to her building. After parking the car and approaching the building, she bent down to look for something in her bag, when someone came crouching down from her right side and stood in front of her. She heard a shot, at first she thought it was a firecracker, until she felt something running down her leg. Then she realized that it was blood and that she was wounded. Eyewitnesses said that two people fled through the passage into the yard, which is on the other side of the building.
Lakić has no doubt that she was attacked because of her work. The motive, as she said, in her texts, "especially when you take into account the context of earlier attacks" and the threats she faced for years.
She said that for the past 10 years she has been the former director of the Police Administration Veselin Veljović, as well as people close to him, spread ugly stories about her, that she is an enemy of the service, the state... He also gave negative evaluations Enis Baković, while he was a deputy prosecutor in Podgorica, about which the journalist then informed his boss Ljiljan Klikovac. He continued in the same tone after he became deputy head of criminal investigation in the Police Directorate, but then, as journalist Lakić said, she had no one to complain to (Veljović was the head of the UP).
A few years later, Veljović was accused of abuse of official position and participation in a criminal organization that, according to the SDT, he organized Aleksandar Mrkic.
Lakić told the prosecutors that she believed that Veljović was behind the earlier attacks and threats directed at her, about whom she complained to the then Deputy Prime Minister in 2011. Duško Marković, to whom she told that the director of the Police Directorate was trying to discredit her. This, as she stated, could have influenced someone to attack her, especially since she writes about criminals in the underground and the state system.
I Zoran Bećirović, who is now in custody because he physically attacked a journalist from "Pobjeda" Anu Raickovic, told Lakić that she was corrupt, about which she informed the former heads of the Prosecutor's Office Ivica Stanković i Milivoj Katnić.
Editor-in-Chief of "Vijesti" Mihajlo Jovovic said, according to the indictment, that he could not claim who ordered the attack, because it could be many of those that Olivera Lakić wrote about. That's why he cited some of her texts, which were about cigarette smuggling and attempted murder Predrag Šukovića (the current head of the Special Police Team), suspicions about the prosecutor's fraud Gruja Radonjić. She also wrote about the incident at the "Beagle" disco in which Bećirović and Vuk Rajkovic, about the aforementioned Aleksandar Mrkić and Veselin Veljović, to whom leads led to the threats that Lakić received in 2011.
Former Prime Minister and President of the National Security Council Dritan Abazovic he is convinced that this attack on the journalist is the result of her long-term research on cigarette smuggling. And that it was planned and carried out as a warning to give it up.
"She discovered and wrote about a notorious clan, the Mojkovac clan, which, as it turned out later through some other SDT actions, was an important cog in organized crime when it comes to cigarette smuggling. In my opinion, the motives for the attack on her should not be sought elsewhere," said Abazović for the website of the Association of Professional Journalists of Montenegro.
The very fact, he says, that the state authorities, specifically the police and the prosecutor's office, have not been able to find the mastermind or the perpetrators of the crime for years, shows that organized crime is behind it.
"Now they have found the executor, but we will see what will happen before the court, it is not known who paid for it, who ordered the execution. Because if it was an incident, a private reason, it would have been resolved in a few days or months. Every murder or attempt that is not solved, perhaps more than 95 percent of the cases, is because it was done by members of organized crime and the perpetrator cannot be reached. We already have a case of the murder of the editor of the "Dan" newspaper. Duško Jovanović, who I also claim was killed by the tobacco mafia," said Abazović.
"I think that in the case of Olivera Lakić, she wanted to send a message of intimidation, that at that moment it was perhaps too much for them to kill another journalist dealing with that topic, rather than to force Olivera Lakić to give up professional activities related to exposing those things," said Abazović.
Evidence and the intention to kill them
In the indictment, the Special Prosecution refers to the statement of associate witness Bajram Pista, who, he claims, was offered money for murder in prison, because it was expected that he would receive a commuted sentence (for a crime unrelated to Lakić) and be released.
Pista, who is from Kosovo, in his statement to the police on July 27, 2023, said that during his stay at ZIKS, Veselin Bubanja confided in him on one occasion and asked him if he knew the journalist Lakić. Bubanja then, as written in the indictment, told him: "That's a bad woman, she's very bad."
When asked why he said that, Bubanja allegedly said: "She saw something she shouldn't have, she got involved in something, let it go".
Bubanja allegedly told Pista that he "raised himself" in the criminal milieu by following the journalist and passing on information about her movements to Filip Bešović and Filip Knežević. He also said, according to SDT, that she was wounded in the leg by a revolver that does not eject cartridges, that Bešović was the driver during the attack, while Knežević fired.
That was while Pista was in the Investigation Prison. When he transferred to the prison section to serve his sentence, on one occasion Filip Bešović came to his cell. He asked him if he would do something, but he said he needed consent Jovan Mirković, for whom he works. Bešović was then angry, as written in the indictment, and left unfinished business, but Goran Rakočević approached him about the same reason later. When they secured the "consent of Mirković", Rakočević suggested to him, according to the prosecution, to "kill a woman", since he knew that Pista would soon be paroled. He specified to him, Pista told the prosecutors, that he should kill the journalist Olivera Lakić. He didn't give a reason, he just said "it bothers me a lot".
Pista later told the police that Rakočević offered him 150.000 and said he would give him 200.000 if everything turned out well. However, there was nothing to reduce the sentence, so Pista offered the police information about the journalist's murder, stating that the preparation of her murder was his motive for cooperating with the authorities, although he admitted that he had previously accepted the job.
Pista was sent to the remand prison in Spuz after his arrest in Budva, where it was suspected that he was involved in the preparation of a murder. She loves Khan. The media announced that Jovan Mirković, whom he mentions, was the driver of the head of the so-called Kavački clan Slobodan Kašćelan.
We asked the Kosovo Police Directorate if they have Pista and Mirković in their records, but they replied that "due to data protection, they are not able to provide that information, unless they are contacted by the competent judicial authorities".
When, during the investigation into the case of Olivera Lakić, information about the cooperating witness surfaced in the public, and this information reached the members of this criminal clan, they tried to deny responsibility. They claimed that Pista was lying, that anyone believed him and that the police were framing them.
We talked to a long-time employee and former head of the Investigation Prison in Spuz about whether it is possible for criminals to confide in each other when they are behind bars. Predrag Spasojević. He says that the need for trust is much more common in some non-everyday life situations, such as prison:
"The narrowness of the space and the long time interval of being together in such a space naturally brings people together and puts them in a situation where they 'brag' to each other or simply confess to each other. They even, not so rarely, confide in the prison staff. Of course, the truth of those statements should be checked".
When asked whether it is realistic to get so close that someone is offered a job as soon as he leaves the prison walls, Spasojević answers: "The answer to that question is the subject of numerous doctoral dissertations, which describe the concept of 'criminal infection', and the concept of retribution for criminal acts, after serving the sentence. It is a big challenge for the system of serving prison sentences. It is a very common case that while serving a prison sentence, a certain number of convicts for minor crimes connect with the structures of organized crime and become their 'soldiers', and commit new and even more serious crimes. So it would not be strange if someone agreed to commit such a serious crime".
The SDT states in the indictment that the witness Bajram Pista could not have known at the time of his testimony that the expert opinion established that the shot was fired from a revolver that does not eject cartridges. This, they claim, confirms the truth of his statement.
During the investigation, the police did not find shell casings at the place where the journalist was shot.
This fact is also mentioned by the accused in the decrypted encrypted messages, which France delivered to the SDT through international legal assistance. In one of the messages, quoted by SDT, Filip Bešović (September 25.9.2020, XNUMX) wrote to Filip Knežević: "You wiped the cartridges and did not touch them. You had gloves, they don't have any proof that you shot there. Nothing was found, nothing light at all. You heard you were still erasing, there is no your DNA, yours against theirs, so let's see what will happen".
How the attack was organized
In the indictment, there is also no information that the gun from which the shots were fired was found, as well as the vehicle in which the attackers came and left the scene of the crime.
The police established that the accused criminal organization had rented at least four apartments in the Podgorica neighborhoods of Stari aerodrome and Zabjelo. Bubanja, Bešović and Knežević stayed in them, which is proven by the traces of their DNA found. During the search, 15.000 euros were found, several weapons, sniper rifles, automatic rifles, silencers for weapons, ammunition for a long-range sniper rifle, explosive devices with a remote activation mechanism, bullets for snipers and machine guns, several bombs, an anti-personnel mine, an anti-armor mine. .. Also, props for concealing identity were found: silicone mask, artificial moustache, phantom hats...
Based on all this, as well as Milan Vujotić's correspondence with members of the criminal clan, in which he talks about thousands of euros with which he bribes, buys apartments for associates and supports their families, acquires weapons, SDT claims that it is an organized criminal clan that deals with murders, drug smuggling and other serious crimes. The correspondence talks about "goods" and jobs in Europe, the killing of high-ranking members of the opposite criminal clan.
On the basis of all this, the prosecution included in the indictment the murder of Miodrag Kruščić, whom, according to the same allegations, he killed Mario Milošević, a member of the same criminal organization led by Vujotić.
SDT did not explain why journalist Olivera Lakić was their target. But they stated that after constantly following Lakić, criminals organized and carried out an attack on her at someone's expense. Daily newspapers were found in the apartments they used, which wrote about the investigation of the attack on Lakić, including a copy of "Vijesti" printed two days after the attack, which contained the text "The attackers are wanted on the camera footage, the motive in the texts".
Attempted cover-up
During the investigation into the wounding of Lakić, on June 19, 2020, Goran Rakočević asked for an active police officer in an encrypted correspondence Darko Lalović to talk to Veselin Veljović, who was then the director of the Police Administration, who would be offered a volunteer to take over the attack on the journalist. That is, as he wrote, that "one of the guys will take over the execution because they will be insulted by the spec (SDT)". Rakočević, who is a former police officer, orders Lalović to use his influence with the then president of the Supreme Court. Vesne Medenica, mentions that he will get money for it, without specifying from whom. She asks that she also urges Veljović with the explanation that "everything is spinning because of Lakićka".
Lalović later suggests to Rakočević that "someone" confesses to the attack on Lakić in front of the High Prosecutor's Office, but he is not sure if it can be trusted "that they will comply, because everyone can leave".
In 2020, Darko Lalović was the driver and security guard of Medenica, who was also mentioned during the attack on Lakić in 2011. At that time, the Basic Prosecutor's Office in Podgorica, which conducted the proceedings, became interested in the investigation against Veljović's driver. Milenko Rabrenović. He was suspected of threatening Lakić and her family, at the time when she wrote about the alleged illegal production and smuggling of cigarettes from the "Tara" factory in Mojkovac.
Rabrenović was acquitted in court after serving as a telecommunications expert Predrag Boljevic changed the finding at the end of the trial, and the court accepted his opinion that the phone can be cloned. At the beginning of this year, he was arrested again, by order of the SDT, due to suspicions that, as an active policeman, he was involved in cigarette smuggling.
When asked whether the upcoming court proceedings could result in obstructions, Olivera Lakić's legal representative, Dalibor Tomović says that it cannot be known until the process begins.
"As far as I learned from the media, the accused can't wait for the process to start in order to prove their innocence," he said.
Experience teaches us that a major problem can be procrastination, or obstruction of the court process. Fourteen defendants, lawyers, witnesses... He knows that it happens that someone "doesn't get an invitation", "is sick", (un)justifiably absent... Like countless times before in similar proceedings. That is why, perhaps, it would be good if the proceedings in which the journalist Olivere Lakić was injured were separated from the "package" of criminal activities that are charged to the accused. This would contribute to the efficiency of the trial, but also reduce the possibility that the victim of an armed attack - a journalist who almost certainly became someone's target just because she was doing her job - is brought into the negative context of the multi-year war between warring criminal clans, drug smuggling, unsolved murders and their helpers from the state system.
If in the near future we receive a final conviction for the direct perpetrators of the attack and wounding of Olivera Lakić, the question remains whether she will be free to live and work in peace, without police escort. Because Milan Vujotić was arrested in Turkey, but has not yet been extradited to Montenegro, Filip Knežević is still on the run, and since we don't know who ordered this and previous attacks, we can't even count on a safe environment for the work of investigative journalists.
Smuggling routes through Montenegro, it is at least clear, have not been interrupted.
Chronology of attacks and threats
Olivera Lakić was physically attacked with blows to the head in March 2012, in Podgorica, in front of the entrance of the building where she lived. She was threatened twice a year before, in late January and early February 2011, because of a series of articles she published in "Vijesti" about allegedly illegal production and smuggling of cigarettes. Finally, in May 2014, she received threats from people close to the man who attacked her in 2012.
We took the chronology of the attacks from the analysis of Action for Human Rights "Threats and attacks on Olivera Lakić January 2011 - May 2014", which was published in 2016.
At the beginning of 2011, the journalist investigated whether fake brands of cigarettes were produced, stored and smuggled in the "Tara" factory in Mojkovac and its warehouse in the suburbs of Podgorica - Donja Gorica. In her texts, it was stated that the officers of the Police Administration and the National Security Agency were connected with this illegal business. After the attack, she publicly accused the director of the Police Administration, Veselin Veljović, of being behind the threats and attacks against her.
The State Prosecutor's Office prosecuted most of the persons who threatened the journalist, including Ivan Bušković, who attacked her in 2012, but it was never investigated who ordered the threats and attacks. Also, the allegations that the journalist published about the illegal operations of the "Tara" factory, which were the trigger for everything that happened to her, were not convincingly investigated. The chief special prosecutor of Montenegro, Milivoje Katnić, stated in November 2015 that the evidence about the tobacco factory in Mojkovac "most likely emigrated and was lost forever", but also that the state prosecution is still dealing with the case.
They were sentenced to low prison terms Slavko Music who first threatened her in 2011, employed by the owner of the factory "Tara" i Ivan Buskovic, a forward from 2012. The director of the Police Administration at the time, Veselin Veljović, meanwhile stated that Bušković was convicted only because the police falsified and hid evidence, so Olivera Lakić filed a criminal complaint on November 2, 2013, requesting that those claims be investigated. The Basic State Prosecutor's Office in Podgorica opened a case and began an investigation, the outcome of which neither the journalist nor the public was informed.
He was unsuccessfully prosecuted Milan Grgurović, who falsely accused himself of threatening Lakić. It was never established why and on whose account he did it. Finally, a police officer, Milenko Rabrenović, close to the then director of the Police Administration, Veljović, was prosecuted for threatening journalist Lakić, her daughter and her daughter's roommate. He was acquitted based on the controversial findings of expert witness Predrag Boljević, who relativized the evidence about the phone number from which the threats were sent with the subsequent claim that it is possible for two mobile networks to register two different mobile phones under the same 15-digit IMEI number at the same time. which was enough for the court to acquit Rabrenović.
The trial of Rabrenović was also marked by the unusual interest of the president of the Supreme Court, Vesna Medenica, and the head of the criminal police in Budva. Siniša Stojković for this case with the Basic State Prosecutor. The Prosecutor's Office decided to prosecute Stojković for the crime of unlawful influence, but the court later acquitted him, again controversially interpreting the Criminal Code.
When Olivera Lakić was threatened in May 2014 by friends of Ivan Bušković, who was previously convicted for attacking her, this was not enough for the court to support the indictment for the criminal offense of endangering security, so these persons were not prosecuted. Journalist Lakić had police protection for two years and seven months after the attack, which she canceled in October 2014 because, as she said, she no longer wanted to live and work in such conditions.
Four years later, she is attacked again in front of her building and lives again with police protection.
Bonus video:
