The indictment panel of the Zagreb County Court confirmed the indictment against Aleksandar Pendev (67) and seven other defendants whom Uskok accuses of having smuggled hundreds of kilograms of cocaine worth seven million euros from South America through the port of Rijeka.
As Hina found out in court, the indictment panel also decided that one of the defendants from Pendev’s group, who was unavailable to the judiciary, would be tried in absentia.
The indictment panel of the County Court in Zagreb confirmed the indictment against Pendev and his co-accused after rejecting in February of last year the defense’s request that the results of searches of the defendant’s homes and secretly recorded conversations be extracted from the file as illegal evidence, which was also rejected by the High Criminal Court after the defender’s appeal, confirming that the collected evidence was legal.
Uskok previously announced, without revealing their identities, how the fifth defendant, Matej Žaja (31), from the summer of 2021 to the beginning of November 2022 in Croatia, Belgium, Colombia, Ecuador and the Dominican Republic, connected the first defendant, Pendev, and the sixth defendant, Goran Brusić, together with other unknown persons.
The goal of their activities was the continuous acquisition of considerable non-proprietary material profit by purchasing, transporting, storing and reselling cocaine on the illegal drug market.
Everyone within the smuggling and distribution chain fulfilled the instructions and assigned tasks given to them by Žaja, whereby he himself was in charge of ensuring the procurement and collection of large quantities of cocaine in the Dominican Republic and Ecuador for smuggling to Europe.
Uskok: Pendev organized the theft of cocaine
Uskok suspects that Žaja hired Pendev to find companies that would serve as fronts and within whose regular operations cocaine would be delivered through the importation of legal goods, while for the smooth customs clearance of legally imported goods, for the sake of faster flow and easier extraction of smuggled cocaine, he hired several other unknown persons as well as Brusić, who, as an employee of the trading company that performs customs clearance in the port of Rijeka, had access containers.
It was also discovered that Pendev, believing that Žaja had cheated him in the agreed cocaine smuggling business, organized the theft of one of the drug shipments in May 2022.
For this, he hired three defendants to further store, store, transport and resell cocaine. It is suspected that Pendev took the drugs for further transfer personally or with the help of four colleagues who were in charge of conducting a reconnaissance first for the purposes of smooth transport of drugs.
Over the course of nine months, according to Uskok’s calculations, at least seven imports of opiates were made with three different trading companies, of which in three cases the so-called test import, while in at least four imports into Croatia, cocaine worth more than seven million euros was smuggled. At the same time, 105.4 kilograms of cocaine were found and confiscated from the total amount smuggled.
In the indictment, Uskok proposed that the property benefit acquired by drug resale in the amount of 3.1 million euros be confiscated from the defendant, but also that the pretrial detention be extended against the five defendants, Hina reminds.
