Ominous traces of Serbian special forces: What the arrest of another suspect in the murder of Oliver Ivanovic reveals

The arrest of Milan Mihajlovic Pop, a former member of the Gendarmerie, who is suspected of belonging to the criminal group that organized the murder of Ivanovic, continues the tragic tradition that members of the Serbian police’s special units are suspected of participating in the most serious political crimes.

Milan Mihajlovic Pop, a former member of the Kraljevac detachment of the Gendarmerie, was arrested on October 19, by order of the Special Prosecutor’s Office of Kosovo, on suspicion of belonging to a criminal group that organized the murder of the leader of the Kosovo Serbs, Oliver Ivanovic. He was arrested late in the evening, in the family house in Leposavic, by members of the Kosovo Security Service armed with rifles, who arrived at the scene in civilian cars.

At the request of the acting prosecutor, Mihajlovic was remanded in custody for 30 days on Friday in the Basic Court in Pristina, after which he was transferred to the detention unit in Gjilan.

After three years spent in the Gendarmerie, Mihajlovic was assigned to the police department of North Mitrovica. During the visits to Kosovo of the former minister Goran Bogdanovic, he was seen in his entourage on several occasions.

He was employed at the North Mitrovica Police Department until the beginning of the process of integration of the police in the north of Kosovo into the Kosovo Police Service, after the signing of the Brussels Agreement. He was not integrated into the KPS.

Mihajlovic’s name is mentioned in several places in the indictment of the Special Prosecutor’s Office of Kosovo, which, let’s remind you, for the past four and a half years, is still the only official legal act issued for Ivanovic’s murder. According to the testimony of the prosecution’s protected witness marked as B1, Mihajlovic was in constant contact with Milan Radoicic during 2017 and was considered his confidant. The period in question is the summer of 2017 and the time of the parliamentary elections, just before the local elections in Kosovo, when there are several attacks on the premises of opposition parties and burning of the cars of opposition politicians in the north of Kosovo.

This witness stated that Mihajlovic seriously threatened him during a later conversation in which the late Oliver Ivanovic was mentioned, which is why he demanded that his house be secured. The same witness stated that, according to his knowledge, Mihajlovic was not in Leposavic on January 16 and 17, 2018, which this witness, as stated in the indictment, found strange.

According to information that reached the Kosovo media from the Special Prosecutor’s Office, Mihajovic was unavailable to the Kosovo authorities in the period from 2019, when a warrant was issued for him, which he denied in his first statement before the court on Friday, September 21, when he was detained. /Nova