Years spent as the head of a number of police agencies made Dragan Lukac one of the most respected police officers in B&H. He is currently the Director of the Federal Police Administration (FUP), which allows him to comment on the security situation in this entity, as well as the state of B&H.
FAKTOR: What is realistic when we talk about terrorism in B&H? How much are we actually targeted by terrorists?
LUKAČ: We have different interpretations of where is B&H in all of this. One of these interpretations represents us as if we are a one of the top countries in terms of potential for performing terrorist activities. Especially when it comes to the capacity of people who can perform terrorist acts from the point of fundamentalism as the basis for this kind of terrorism. Others are using these assessment for political purposes. It is true that these assessments are over exaggerated. Realistic assessment is that the terrorism and terroristic threats in B&H are not any different compared to any other country in Europe.
We are a country in which these threats are coming more than from any other country, Germany, Austria, Serbia etc. We cannot deny that we have these kinds of problems. And we have these problems primarily in the FB&H. These are the actions of radical community, which can be fertile ground for recruiting terrorists or activities based on the ideologies and radicalism. We have such communities and they are mostly radical communities from a position of Wahabi or Selefi practice of Islam as a religion. But I do not agree when people say that there is 3,000 or 5,000 potential terrorists, so-called sleepers, who can commit act of terrorism at any time. I disagree with that! We have that number of members of these communities, but not every member of such a community is potential terrorist.
FAKTOR: However, we have 51 people who returned from the Middle East, where they fought in one of the military units. What about them?
LUKAČ: These people are a potential security threat. There is no person that can return from battlefield and not to be a person who is different from the normal people. There is possibility that they can perform terroristic attack or a security operation that can endanger lives and property, in B&H or somewhere else. I do not have the information on how many of them there is, but we are making detailed investigation of the situation on the field. I expect to have a complete register of these kind of persons soon. They will be, and some of them already are, under some sort of surveillance by police structures in B&H and we have to work with this kind of people. These people know that they are under surveillance and they should know it. Their willingness to make a terrorist act will be lower if they are aware that we are observing them. I believe that wider community should be dealing with this category of people, especially in terms of re-socialization.
(Source: A. Seckanovic/Faktor.ba)
