Former spies deny killing Serbian journalist
AFP
June 2, 2015, 4:37 am
Belgrade (AFP) - Three former Serbian intelligence officers on Monday pleaded not guilty at the beginning of their trial for the 1999 murder of journalist Slavko Curuvija, a fierce critic of the country's then strongman Slobodan Milosevic.
"There is no evidence that I have killed Slavko Curuvija, nobody claimed so," said the first defendant, Radomir Markovic, the notorious Milosevic-era secret police chief.
Markovic, who is currently serving a 40-year sentence for the 1999 attempted murder of an opposition leader, also denied having planned and ordered the murder, as the prosecutor states in the indictment, Beta news agency reported.
Two other defendants, Milan Radonjic and Ratko Romic, former senior officers of the State Security Service, also denied involvement in the murder. The two were arrested in January 2014 and have remained in custody ever since.
A fourth defendant, former security services agent Miroslav Kurak is on the run and an international warrant has been issued for his arrest. He is being tried in absentia.
Curuvija was shot dead in front of his central Belgrade house in April 1999, during the NATO bombing campaign against Serbia aimed at stopping its crackdown on ethnic Albanian population in Kosovo.
In days prior to Curuvija's murder, Milosevic's powerful wife Mirjana Markovic named Curuvija in a daily newspaper as a supporter of the NATO bombing campaign.
At the time, he was the editor and owner of Dnevni Telegraf and Evropljanin, two of the leading independent publications in the country.
Curuvija's murder was widely blamed on Milosevic's secret police. His family has accused Milosevic of personally ordering the killing.
"I have said it before, I do not think that anybody else could have issued the order to state services but Slobodan Milosevic," Curuvija family's lawyers Slobodan Ruzic told reporters.
Milosevic died in 2006 in a prison cell in the Hague-based UN war crimes tribunal for former Yugoslavia, as he awaited the verdict after being tried for his role during the 1990s wars in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo.
Mirjana Markovic was given asylum in Russia after Milosevic's extradition to the Hague in June 2001.
