Organized crime prosecutor Mladen Nenadić sent a letter to the French court in June of last year asking them to provide him with messages exchanged by 159 people via the special application "Sky", he learned. KRIK.
This secret communication application has been used by members of many criminal groups around the world. After France, in cooperation with the police of other European countries, managed to decipher these messages, a series of arrests of criminals in many countries began in early 2021.
In Serbia, several major cases were initiated on the basis of "Sky" messages: members of Veljko Belivuk's group were arrested, and a new indictment was brought against drug lord Darko Šarić.
The Serbian prosecutor's office, however, was exposed to public criticism because it did not arrest any important state functionary who used "Sky" phones and communicated with the mafia through them.
Whoever saw the memo that prosecutor Nenadić drew up on June 10, 2022, could have briefly thought that things would change after all. Namely, the list of "Sky" users that the prosecutor was interested in included criminals, their victims from competing groups, lawyers - but also one notable name from the former top police.
Nenadić asked France to deliver him the "sky" messages of Dijana Hrkalović, former secretary in the Ministry of Internal Affairs and former face of the Serbian state's fight against the mafia.
To justify his request, the prosecutor explained that he suspected that Hrkalović was a member of a larger criminal group involved in four murders and five attempted murders.
Apart from her, Nenadić also asked the French about the identity of two influential people from the state who helped the mafia - they used "Sky" phones hiding behind the nicknames Edo and Markus. According to available data, Edo worked at the top of the Ministry of Police, and Markus at the intelligence agency BIA.
This questioning by the prosecutor, however, again did not lead to the arrest of anyone from the authorities in Serbia.
France sent the requested information to Nenadić in October 2022, and as a result, nearly 40 members of the "Vračar" clan, an outpost of the Kavac clan in Serbia, were arrested, but not a single official who cooperated with them.
The letter from June 2022, the content of which is now revealed by KRIK, nevertheless, testifies to the fact that the Serbian prosecutor's office has known for at least a year that Hrkalović used the "Sky" phone, and despite receiving her messages from France - so far, nothing has been done about it .
NIKA RINA
"Let's remember that mantra - the mafia cannot function without the support of state officials. What will state officials do?" Hrkalović asked in an interview she gave in June last year.
Just at that time, she got into a public conflict with her former boss, the Minister of Police, Nebojša Stefanović, and they accused each other of who was using secret phones to collaborate with the mafia.
Stefanović called on the state authorities to announce whether Hrkalović owned a Sky phone and whether she used it to exchange voice messages with the infamous murderer from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Darko Elez.
"Because when you send voice messages, then there is no doubt who is on the other side," Stefanović said at the time.
Exactly ten days before Hrkalović and Stefanović got into the confrontation, the first man of the Prosecutor's Office for Organized Crime, Nenadić, sent a letter in which he asked for "sky" messages from domestic users.
This document, obtained by KRIK, shows that Stefanović was well informed.
According to the prosecutor's memo, Hrkalović changed five different nicknames she hid behind while using the "Sky" application - she called herself Arona, Vila, Villa, Nike and Rina.
Hrkalović, by the way, in one short period - from mid-July to the end of November 2019, officially changed her name to Nika Rina. Nika was the goddess of victory in the mythology of the ancient Greeks.
In the memo, the Prosecution also claims that Hrkalović, once the second most powerful person in the police, is suspected of being a member of a criminal group made up of as many as 77 people, but does not state exactly what her role was. According to the prosecution's suspicions, this group was involved in drug smuggling, four murders and five attempted murders.
In addition to Hrkalović, among the suspects are the head of the Montenegrin kavak clan, Radoje Zvicer, as well as the well-known murderer from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Darko Elez, who was previously known to have been in contact with Hrkalović.
In addition to the suspected members of this group, the prosecution asked the French court to provide the "Sky" messages of those who were killed, lawyers who had criminals as clients, but also for a number of people whose identities have not been established - only their nicknames are known on the "sky". In total, messages were requested for 159 "Sky" users.
Almost six months after the letter, at the end of October 2022, the prosecution received a response from the French authorities.
Based on the "Sky" messages they received, they soon arrested and issued a search warrant for 38 people - which is approximately half of those who were initially suspected of being members of a criminal group - and identified them as the Vračar clan, which was the Belgrade branch. Zvicer's Kavak clan.
"Vračarci", led by Nikola Vušović aka Johnny, who is on the run, are accused of killing three members of the criminal milieu - Aleksandar Halabrin, Dragan Ristić and Aleksandar Sarac, as well as trying to kill five more. One murder mentioned in the prosecutor's memo, however, has not been solved - the killing of the well-known Belgrade criminal Vladimir Popović, known as Vlada Pop, which took place in December 2018. To date, no one has been charged with this murder.
Popović's close associates previously accused Hrkalović of being behind this liquidation, but they did not present any concrete evidence for this.
Hrkalović, although marked as a suspect in the prosecution's letter, was not among those arrested when the "Vračarci" fell. Neither is Elez, nor are there about thirty other people from the list who were originally marked as members of the clan.
EDO AND MARCUS
According to the letter that KRIK journalists had access to, the Serbian prosecutor's office requested the delivery of messages not only for Hrkalović, but also for at least two other people who are known to be officials who collaborated with criminals.
These are the people who introduced themselves as Edo and Markus on "sky". French colleagues were reminded that it is not known who is behind these nicknames.
The people who used these nicknames on "Skaj" were people from the state apparatus who helped the famous drug lord Darko Sarić.
Namely, the indictment against Šarić quotes messages allegedly sent by him, his brother Duško and members of his group, from which it is clear that Edo is a high-ranking person in the Serbian police, while Markus is from the BIA intelligence service. By the way, Šarić was accused last year on the basis of "sky" of having planned the murder of a key associate witness in the proceedings against him.
Thus, in the messages he sent in mid-2020, Duško Šarić says that two policemen, who were later accused as members of Šarić's group, are under Ed's control.
"I guarantee you about these guys that they don't do anything without Ed's permission, nor are they allowed to," Duško wrote about these two policemen in a message he sent to his brother, who was in custody at the time.
During the period when the messages were exchanged, Darko Šarić was apparently trying to exert pressure on the court that was ruling at the time in the trial against him for drug smuggling.
"Dača and Mika (police officers accused as members of Šarić's group) appealed to the president (Appeal Court in Belgrade) on Ed's behalf because of you, and then he said that he would open the process because of you," Duško wrote to his brother in May 2020.
Even Duško Šarić, as can be interpreted from the messages, had a meeting with the President of the Court of Appeal, Duško Milenkovic, in the building of the Security and Information Agency (BIA), and the meeting was also attended by an employee of this agency, Markus. Then the president of the court allegedly explained to them that he could not influence the judge who tried Sarić and that "it can only be solved by one man".
The group then tried through Marcus to reach this very powerful person who can influence the judges and the only one "who can cut" - who they called Oscar. It is interesting that Prosecutor Nenadić did not ask his colleagues from France to submit "Sky" messages related to Oskar, as can be seen in the letter from June 2022.
Of all these mysterious people, Ed is the only one who has been guessed by the public as to who it might be.
In a public exchange of fire last year, Hrkalović accused her former boss Stefanović of being Edo.
"Did you, as Edo, communicate with some criminals on 'Skaj' and do some business with them", she publicly asked Stefanović.
"I would also ask the prosecution, gentlemen, did you happen to receive any material from 'sky' and whether there is any Edo with high-ranking criminals", Hrkalović added in her address on June 22 last year, only twelve days after the prosecution sent a letter owned by KRIK.
The Prosecutor's Office confirmed to KRIK journalists that it received a response to this request, but it is not known what it learned from the messages exchanged between Hrkalović, Edo and Markus via the "Sky" application.
The prosecution did not answer KRIK's questions about what exactly Hrkalović was suspected of, as well as who is hiding behind the nicknames Edo and Markus. It only stated that part of the received messages from "sky" are used in several procedures.
"Part of the submitted data was used as evidence in the investigation that resulted in indictment against 38 persons, organizers and members of the so-called of the Vračar criminal clan, part of which is the basis for conducting a new investigation in connection with the attempted murder of a person in order to prevent him from cooperating with the judicial authorities of a neighboring country, while part of it is used in ongoing pre-criminal proceedings and to shed light on several criminal acts." , says the prosecution's response.
PROCEDURE AGAINST HRKALOVIĆ
Hrkalović was never accused of organized crime, nor of participation in murder. However, she is being prosecuted for minor crimes.
She was accused of abusing her position in the police in several ways. Among other things, that she sabotaged the investigation against Veljko Belivuk, an associate of the Kavački clan, for the murder committed in the center of Belgrade in 2017 - better known to the public as the murder on the rails.
According to the indictment, Hrkalović ordered the police officers not to submit the report of the analysis of Belivuk's phones to the prosecution. She had a good reason for it. According to this report, the details of which were first published by NIN, Hrkalović was often mentioned in Belivuk's messages.
Namely, the messages show that Belivuk worked under the auspices of the state, and that Nenad Vučković Vučko, an important member of the Gendarmerie and former emotional partner of Hrkalović, conveyed to this criminal the requests of the former state secretary in the MUP.
“Be patient, please. Here, Diana is begging you," wrote Vučković to Belivuk, and he replied: "There's nothing to beg of me, brother - whatever you need."
The messages also reveal that Hraklović was not at the top of the decision-making chain, but that two more people above her were informed about the relations with Belivuk - her "boss" and "main boss".
"I know. She knows. Our boss knows. The main boss knows," Vučković informed Belivuk in one message.
Vladimir Popović Pop is also mentioned in this communication - whose murder the prosecution mentions in the letter about "Skaj", and which has not been solved to this day. After Popović was arrested by the police in 2017, Vučković triumphantly informed Belivuk: "We set out... to break the back."
Besides ordering these messages to be hidden from the prosecution, Hrkalović also helped the criminal Darko Elez, the prosecution claims.
Allegedly, she ordered the police to place Elez under wiretapping measures, thereby preventing other police departments from launching a real investigation into this dangerous criminal.
The third thing that Hrkalović was accused of is that she ordered the police officers to delete the recording of the wiretapped conversation of lawyer Dragoslav Miša Ognjanović - who was later killed.
In this eavesdropped conversation, Ognjanović mentioned first that the criminal was Elez Hrkalović's man, but also said that she was involved in the investigation against Belivuk for the murder on the rails, saying that it was "her plaything".
All these accusations, however, are far from those that can bring a serious punishment to Hrkalovićka. At that time, prosecutor Milenko Mandić did not deal with the content of the evidence itself, that is, the relations that Hrkalović had with the criminals Belivuk and Eleza.
The same prosecutor later took over the "Witchcrafters" case.
She denied guilt in court, and she also pointed out that she never had "private contact" with Eleza.
FAITHFUL TO VUCIC
Although at one point it seemed that the state would really deal with Hrkalović - given that the pro-government tabloids on the front pages daily accused her of being behind the murders in Serbia - that never happened.
She did spend five months in custody, but the accusations turned out to be thin, and when her lawyer became an influential member of the Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) Vladimir Đukanović, things got better for her.
First, she was released from custody to go home with a nanoleg, and later the nanoleg was removed.
Two weeks ago, she was also photographed at the SNS meeting in Pančevo, where Vučić addressed the crowd. In the photo published on social networks, Hrkalović can be seen in the crowd, and next to her are two men with dark caps.
Then, last Friday, she appeared at Vučić's "Serbia of Hope" rally.
Hrkalović has always emphasized that she is loyal to the country's president, Aleksandar Vučić. In one of her last public addresses, she even called him "the sun".
"I am proud of him. Proud that he leads us as president. What a patriot, genius leader he is. You simply cannot help but admire him. (…) A man I look at literally like the sun," she said in June of last year, at the time when the prosecution requested her "Sky" messages from France.
KRIK journalists tried to contact Hrkalović through her lawyer Vladimir Đukanović and ask her questions.
"She will never give you a statement. So, there is no need to contact her. I can ask her, but I already know the answer," Djukanović immediately told KRIK journalists, and after hearing from Hrkalović, he sent a message: "She's not interested."
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