There was no need to wait 7.5 years for someone to establish that Alisa Ramić (née Mutap) did not have amnesia when we know that there is no medical document that would support such a claim, said lawyer Ifet Feraget in the new edition of the news show Dnevnik 2 after the second-instance verdict in the “Zijad Mutap and others” case, in connection with the case of the death of Dženan Memic in 2016.
The Council of the Appellate Division of the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina today issued a second-instance verdict in the case “Zijad Mutap and others”, in connection with the case of the death of Dženan Memić in 2016, in which the accused Alisa Ramić (née Mutap) and Hasan Dupovac were found guilty of concealing evidence. Alisa Ramić (Mutap), the girlfriend of the victim Dženan Memić, was sentenced to two and a half years in prison, and Hasan Dupovac, the former head of the Department for Traffic Investigations in the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MUP) of Sarajevo Canton (KS), to three years in prison. Ramić was found guilty of giving a false statement, and Dupovac was convicted of abuse of office.
Zijad Mutap, Josip Barić and Muamer Ožegović were released.
“According to the European Convention, Article 7, that is, Article 2 of the Additional Protocol, our law was not obliged to provide for an appeal for the accused in a situation where they were acquitted in the first-instance proceedings and convicted in the second-instance, as we have the case here, but the law, and I’m talking about this from the aspect of respect for human rights, still provided for such a possibility, and that’s good for the accused”, Feraget points out.
He emphasizes that the convicted have the right to appeal, as do the prosecutors, in relation to the criminal sanctions imposed in the sentencing part, and in relation to the acquittal part of the verdict, the Prosecution has no right to appeal. Feraget is of the opinion that this is an oversight by the legislator.
“This represents an omission. This is certainly a tailwind today for the continuation of the investigation led by Ćazim Hasanspahić and Dubravko Čampara. What is striking is that this quantity and quality of evidence was available to the Prosecutor’s Office of the Canton of Sarajevo, which at the time presented the case and was led by Dalila Burzić. That is why I said that it is possible to roughly predict the direction in which the investigation will go, because the Act on the Cantonal Prosecutor’s Office and the Act on Criminal Procedure prescribe the legal measures prosecutors must take and are obliged to undertake in terms of investigative actions, so the question arises why Alisa Ramić was given the status of a victim, that is, a witness, why was she not a suspect based on the same evidence?”, asks the lawyer of the Memic family.
He believes that there was no need to wait years for this decision.
“There was no need to wait 7.5 years for someone to establish that she did not have amnesia when we know that there is no medical document that would support such a claim and that the cantonal prosecutors subsequently insisted on conducting an expert examination to establish that Alisa Ramić had amnesia. We also have false expert findings, giving a false statement by an expert, so the investigation will continue in that direction, and of course the main goal is to determine who the murderers of Dženan Memic are, and the prosecutors are far behind yes, but before the court you must have evidence beyond a reasonable doubt”, said Feraget, among other things, in an interview with BHRT.
Let us remind you that Dženan Memic was seriously injured on February 8, 2016 in Velika Aleja in Ilidža, and he died a few days later. The Prosecutor’s Office of Sarajevo Canton tried to prove that it was a traffic accident, for which Ljubo and Bekrija Seferović were accused. Prosecutors failed to prove the indictment on two occasions before the Cantonal Court in Sarajevo. After those verdicts were annulled, the Supreme Court of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina also determined that there was no evidence that Dženan died in a traffic accident.
The Prosecutor’s Office of Bosnia and Herzegovina also got involved in the Memic case, so that a second process was conducted before the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which was supposed to determine whether evidence had been concealed and the investigation obstructed in the past years.
