
“We are the soldiers”. This was the only sentence that Luka Bojovic, the leader of the new Zemun clan, uttered in Serbian to his friends and colleagues who were arrested with him after lunch in a restaurant on 9 February 2012, when he was arrested in Valencia. At the table with Bojović were Vladimir Milisavljević “Budala”, Vladimir Mijanović “Zuba” and Siniša Petrić “Zenica”, his closest associates from the clan, but also from the battlefields of the former Yugoslavia. A brief warning to friends that they were soldiers was followed by their refusal to hand over the requested documents to the Spanish police. All three obeyed without a word.
This arrested quartet is the most graphic illustration of the links between war crimes and today’s criminal clans, security services and even the very top of the Serbian state.
Apart from Bojović, about whom practically everything is known since the arrest of the “Zemunci”, the least written and known is about Siniša Petrić “Zenica”, one of Bojović’s closest associates and friends from the time when he went to Erdut as just coming of age in 1991, where he joined the paramilitary unit of the Serbian Volunteer Guard of Željko Ražnatović Arkan.
As “Zenica” joined Arkan at that time, the long-standing friendship and cooperation between Bojović and Petrić began on the bloody Croatian battlefield. In 1993 and 1994, Petrić became a member of the notorious Marinko Magda gang, which committed a series of monstrous crimes and massacred entire families in Subotica, Crvenka and Szeged for the sake of profit. The investigation revealed that the weapons used for these crimes were weapons brought from the battlefield by members of Magda’s group. Petric was sentenced to 15 years in prison and placed in the “Dubrava” prison near the Istok in Kosovo, from where he miraculously disappeared in 1999 during a NATO bombing, with the help of the Special Operations Unit led by Milorad Ulemek Legija. In 2003, Petrić will be arrested again, under international arrest warrant, again in prison and – again – he escapes. His name is associated with several professional liquidations in those years, committed at the expense of the Zemun clan, until he was arrested in Valencia in 2012, together with his old partner Bojovic, and sentenced to 15 years in prison.
Bojović told the truth during his arrest in Valencia – he and “Zenica” are soldiers. First to Arkan, then to the Legion, then to the Zemun clan, and all this time they were loyal soldiers of the Serbian State Security Service, today’s Security-Information Agency (BIA).
This is best evidenced by the strong intelligence-diplomatic activity that, according to well-informed sources, has been carried out by the serbian diplomatic services in recent years to find a legal solution for the release of Bojovic and Petric, that is to be transferred to a “neighbourhood” prison where the BIA can control them.
When Luka Bojovic arrived in Serbia at the end of 2022, after having served 10 of the 18 years of imprisonment to which he had been sentenced in Spain, the news that Siniša Petrić “Zenica” had been granted to serve the last three years and 10 months of his sentence in the prison in Trebinje passed completely unnoticed. As is happening with Petrić when he is within reach of the BIA, it is to be expected that this unscrupulous murderer will “evaporate” from Trebinje prison, which would be the third time he has done so. He was supposed to be transferred to Trebinje at the end of 2022, but there is no official information that this has actually happened.
MASSACRE IN THE “PANDA” CAFE IN PEJA
But if the political will existed in Serbia, the case of the massacre in the “Panda” cafe in Peja, where six young men were killed on 14 December 1998, could now be clarified and solved to the end. Ivan Obradovic (14), Vukota Gvozdenovic (16), Svetislav Ristic (17), Zoran Stanojevic (17), Dragan Trifkovic (17) and Ivan Radevic (25) were killed that night, and their families still have no answers after 24 years not even a glimmer of hope from Serbia’s state institutions that the investigation could soon be concluded and charges brought for the murders of their children and brothers.
According to reliable information obtained by M portal from regional intelligence services, this crime was committed on behalf of the State Security Service by Luka Bojović, Siniša Petrić “Zenica” and Radomir Boban Baćović, today the head of the Skaljar clan and one of Bojović’s closest associates. The order was given by Radomir Rade Marković, then head of the State Security Service, Milorad Ulemek Legija, commander of the Special Operations Unit (JSO), was the organiser, and Bojović, “Zenica” and Baćović were the direct executors.
Very few people have information about their involvement in the massacre, it is classified at the highest level, and today’s BIA, the successor of the State Security Service, uses it for its own interests and those of the Serbian political elite.
The massacre in the cafe in Peć took place on 14 December 1998, at the height of the conflict in Kosovo, when Slobodan Milosevic had decided to resolve the “Kosovo issue” by armed force. Albanians were immediately suspected of the murder of the six young men, and the media proclaimed the Kosovo Liberation Army as the main culprit. Three days after the murder, police arrested Agron Kolcaku, Gazmend Bajrami, Xhevdet Bajrami, Becir Lodja and Vlaznim Pergjegjaj on suspicion of the crime in the neighbourhood of Kapišnica in Peć. The public image was created that members of the OVK were responsible for the killing and that it was revenge for the murder of 34 members of their organisation a few days earlier, thus achieving the objective of the Milosevic government – tensions between Serbs and Albanians in Kosovo were at their maximum and the road to bloody revenge was open. The five suspected Albanians were released on 15 December 1999 through the intervention of the International Committee of the Red Cross.
BEHIND THE SCENES
What was hidden from the public and the media’s clever spies at the time, however, was that at the time of the crime in the Panda café, Peć was under the control of Ulemek’s special operations unit, which patrolled the city every day, causing a disturbance to the Serbian and the Albanian population. Since 1997, the JSO headquarters was located in a resort near the Visoki Dečani monastery, so it is hard to believe that the OVK, and especially a less organised group, would dare to commit such a massacre in the presence of the notorious Ulemek’s “Red Berets”, made up of well-trained special forces, but largely hardened, ruthless criminals recruited through the State Security Service from prisons and the streets. Their ranks include members of Arkan’s “Tigers”, a paramilitary unit that Luka Bojović joined in 1991 at the age of 18.
Television testimonies of Luka Bojović’s stay with the Legion in Kosovo during the war and the NATO intervention are available from his father Vuk Bojović and his close friend and Arkan’s bodyguard Rado Rakonjac. Vuk Bojovic claimed that his son joined Luka Arkan’s “Tigers” voluntarily, “misled by the Great Serbian propaganda”, and that all further duties, including his stay in Kosovo in 1998 and 1999, were carried out under orders from the State Security Service.
That December 1998, just 26 kilometres from Peć and 50 from the Legija’s “Red Beret” base, Bojović’s old friend from the “Tigers” and multiple brutal murderer Siniša Petrić “Zenica” was serving a 15-year prison sentence in the “Dubrava” prison near Istok. At the end of the gloomy 1990s, the Serbian State Security Service also recruited Radomir Boban Baćović, then a member of the Nikšić criminal gang “Kvartasi”. His file officially records only one arrest in Serbia in 2013, but well-informed sources claim that this was the work of the SDB, which, after arresting him for minor offences, released him from prison while he in turn, did dirty work for the service.
After receiving an order from the then SDB chief Radomir Markovic that a massacre should be carried out in Kosovo, which would be attributed to the Albanians and the OVK, in order to create the environment for an absolute military action, Milorad Ulemek Legija chose three people for this task – Luka Bojovic, Siniša Petrić and Radomir Baćović.
The trio that will perpetrate the massacre in “Panda” will grow into one of the most notorious criminal clans in Europe./Mportal/