The affairs of the new police minister who “likes female journalists who kneel easily”: From the helicopter crash to the meeting with Koluvia

Vucic’s manner of rotating people at the head of bodies that have the possibility of legitimate use of force will probably continue in the future.

In this new distribution of cards, Bratislav Gasic, the man who for the last five years led the Security and Information Agency (BIA), and in the first Vucic government was in charge of the defense department, will in the future be the head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs.

With this appointment, Gasic will be able to “unfreeze” his membership in the Serbian Progressive Party, which he suspended in 2017 in order to fulfill the legal requirement to become the director of the BIA.

Whatever function he held, affairs that followed him from position to position were constant.

The time spent at the Ministry of Defense was marked by the fall of a military helicopter, in which six crew members and the child they were trying to rescue died. And although the version that Gasic ordered the helicopter to take off appeared in public, the prosecution found that no one should bear criminal responsibility in this accident. Aleksandar Vucic himself once said: “I will not give Gasic and Loncar”, claiming that the then ministers of defense and health did nothing wrong.

However, not long after that, Vucic fired Gasic for a sexist comment that was recorded by numerous cameras. Namely, while the journalists were preparing to take a statement from him, Gasic said that he “likes female journalists who kneel easily”.

Gasic “lasted” for the next year and a half without office, after which Vucic appointed him to the post of BIA director. And even though he was significantly less exposed to the media in this function, affairs caught up with Gasic here as well.

That’s how his name was heard last year at the court proceedings against Zoran Jotic Jotka, a convicted criminal from Krusevac, due to the murder. Namely, a person who is suspected of being a member of Jotic’s group was recorded saying that “Bratislav Gasic is at the cauldron” at Jotic’s. The director of the BIA did not publicly announce this case, except that he sued the portal KRIK for the publication of the text.

Gasic did not advertise even after the President of Serbia, Aleksandar Vucic, confirmed that the director of the BIA was seeing the owner of the Jovanjica plantation, Predrag Koluvija, who is on trial for releasing 1.6 tons of cannabis.

However, as Vucic said, the contact was unrelated, and Gasic made an official note about it.

“But I don’t have any problem with it being re-examined, with everything being re-examined, and with the prosecution having full insight so that a final decision could be made in court,” said Vucic.

With the mortgage of those numerous affairs, Gasic is now going to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, proving that there is no story in Serbia that can harm the rating of the ruling party.