Numerous arrests and police actions that have taken place in Sarajevo in recent years remain without a court epilogue to this day.
This is especially painful for citizens in cases that resulted in death. Given that court processes last for years, and sometimes more than a decade, the families of the victims try into old age to reach the truth, justice, and peace.
The citizens of Sarajevo have been asking for years how it is possible that cases like traffic accidents in which people died cannot be resolved, or how prosecutors and, ultimately, courts still have no explanation for some deaths – in some cases, it’s still unknown how they even happened, let alone who is suspected.
In such cases, one must always start with the case of Dzenan Memic. Without carefully choosing words, we can freely state that it is completely unbelievable that even after nine years, the case of the death of a 21-year-old young man cannot be resolved. Dzenan Memic died in February 2016, and since then, three courts have made decisions on what happened and how it happened, but none has convicted a potential killer. The Cantonal Prosecutor’s Office in Sarajevo was the only one that brought individuals to court whom they claimed were the killers, but the Cantonal Court twice struck down their indictments, as did the Supreme Court of the Federation.
The suspicion that the Sarajevo Cantonal Prosecutor’s Office deliberately steered the investigation and indictment in a different direction from day one was held by the Memic family, which even then claimed that the chief cantonal prosecutor Dalida Burzic was deliberately hiding the “real” killers and that Dzenan did not die in a traffic accident, as prosecutor Sead Krestalica claimed before the court. In the end, the court determined that there was no traffic accident. The entire process against Ljubo and Bekrija Seferovic lasted until the summer of 2021 when it finally “fell” before the Supreme Court. By then, five and a half years had already passed since the young man’s death.
Since then, the Sarajevo Cantonal Prosecutor’s Office has had nothing to do with the Memic case, as the investigation was taken over by the Prosecutor’s Office of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH). To this day, it has not filed an indictment against anyone for the murder of this young man.
An even older case than Memic’s is that of Adnan Salcin. He was killed in a car at a roundabout in the Mojmilo neighborhood back at the beginning of 2015. After years of investigation, in 2018 the State Investigation and Protection Agency (SIPA) submitted a report to the Sarajevo Cantonal Prosecutor’s Office stating that Aleksandar Zivkovic and Safet Koric were responsible for the murder. Zivkovic, suspected as the perpetrator, was extradited to BiH from Sweden in 2022. Since then, the last known information about this case is that the investigation is ongoing.
Another murder case that shocked the capital of BiH happened in the summer of 2020 when Nedzib Spahic Dziba was killed in Grbavica.
The suspect in the case was Sasa Golub, who turned himself in after three years on the run. The Cantonal Court in Sarajevo acquitted him in March this year of the murder of Spahic.
Unresolved to this day is also the death of Hava Dovadzija in the Nedzarici neighborhood on April 1st, 2014. Semir Rastoder is suspected in her death. The Cantonal Court in Sarajevo sentenced him to 5.5 years in prison, but in 2019 the Supreme Court of the Federation overturned that verdict. At that point, the Supreme Court of the Federation took over the case, and the start of a new process is still awaited. Rastoder’s lawyer, Alen Nakic, said that he expects a call for the start of the process “in a month or two.”
Even six and a half years after the murder of the Sarajevo police officers, Savo Marinkovic and Aleksandar Macan have not received a final verdict. In the first-instance ruling at the end of 2024, Marinkovic received 45 years, and Macan 15 years.
In addition to these cases, the public was also shocked by the death of the girl Dzena Gadzun at the end of 2021.
The girl Dzena was operated on in November 2021 at the private clinic “Bejtovic” in Sarajevo. During the operation, complications occurred, and she died on November 14th, 2021, at the Sarajevo University Clinical Center.
In this case, doctors Suad Rozajac, Jasmina Halimic-Alajbegovic, and Nina Jovanovic have been indicted.
Benjamin Bejtovic, the owner of the private clinic where the operation was performed, has not been indicted.
The trial at the Cantonal Court in Sarajevo has been ongoing since September 2023. Since then, dozens of hearings have been canceled for various reasons. Currently, the defense witness testimonies are ongoing, but it is a big question when this will end, considering that several recent hearings have also been postponed.
Such and similar cases cause citizens to lose trust in the work of judicial institutions, without even going into who in the chain of responsibility is to blame, as the years go by and families wait for justice. Even though we touched on only Canton Sarajevo (CS) in this text, the situation is not much better in other cantons, or at other levels either, Klix.ba writes.
