BELGRADE: Hundreds protested in Belgrade today over a court ruling that acquitted four former intelligence officers jailed for the 1999 murder of journalist Slavko Curuvija.
The decision has been condemned by opposition politicians and media rights campaigners. Today, demonstrators waved placards and held banners during a 25-minute silence.
“This is the message from the state that journalists are not protected. And what other citizens can understand as well is that they themselves are not protected if the journalists aren’t,” said Zeljko Bodrozic, president of the Independent Association of Journalists in Serbia.
An appeals court ruling published on Friday overturned the 2021 convictions and lengthy jail terms for four intelligence officers. The long legal process has been marked by dramatic twists.
In 2021, a special court sentenced former secret police chief Radomir Markovic and the head of Belgrade’s intelligence branch Milan Radonjic to 30 years in prison.
Two other intelligence officers were handed 20-year sentences.
The four were first found guilty in 2019, but that decision was overturned and a retrial was ordered.
Curuvija, owner and editor of two leading widely-read independent publications, was shot 13 times in front of his Belgrade home during the Nato bombing campaign launched in response to strongman Slobodan Milosevic’s crackdown on ethnic Albanians in Kosovo in the late 1990s.
His killing came just days after pro-government media outlets had accused him of being a “traitor” and of having called on Nato to bomb Serbia.
“I will never forget the day they killed Curuvija. I am not a journalist, but I felt unsafe. This is just deja vu,” Slobodanka Milicevic, a 55-year-old economist in Belgrade, told AFP on the sidelines of the protest today.
Journalists have long been targeted in Serbia. Reporters and editors critical of the authorities have been assaulted and intimidated.
President Aleksandar Vucic, who served as information minister under Milosevic, regularly berates reporters during his public addresses.
