Attacks on police officers and an increasing number of other criminal offenses are once again raising the issue of the security situation in our country. The authorities claim that the situation is stable and under control. However, additional concern is created by the possibility that the motives of the attack are related to the work that the police officers were doing.
After Radenko Bašić, head of the Criminal Police Department, was killed in Prijedor last year, the public was disturbed by the murder of an inspector in Bijeljina. Targeting police officers raises the question of how safe we are.
“I believe that security is at a high level, but such cases call for additional vigilance and to take additional measures to prevent such events,” says BiH Security Minister Nenad Nešić.
Professor at the Faculty of Criminology, Criminology and Security Studies at UNSA, Eldan Mujanović, points out that it is worrying that we have had several murders of police officers recently: “Let them be connected to the work they did to detect and prosecute organized crime, but it is also an alarm and a question that is brought into the context of increasingly frequent violence”.
Deciphering the evidence from the crime apps Skay and Anom led to the perpetrators of the murders of two Sarajevo police officers. After six indictments were filed last year in cases from these applications, the Prosecutor’s Office is announcing new ones by the end of this year. The evidence has so far led to the police and security structures: “In these actions, by order of the Prosecutor’s Office of BiH, more than 100 suspects were detained, including 15 suspected employees and officials from various police and security law enforcement agencies in BiH.” (Border Police of BiH, MUP of RS, DKPT of BiH, SIPA, OSA, MUP of KS), including a judge and a lawyer, and a former adviser in the Ministry of Security of BiH”.
“The fact that someone is in a certain position should not be a protection for the inspector, chief or anyone else if they used illegal applications in the form of communication, they really need to be prosecuted and I call on the prosecution to speed up the work on Sky Anom, to disclose the names and politicians and officials and policemen and that they be sanctioned”, says Minister Nešić.
With the aim of strengthening capacity, the team of prosecutors of the Special Department for Organized Crime, Economic Crime and Corruption has been expanded to ten persons hired to work on these cases.
“The data obtained through international police and judicial cooperation, and concerning the exchange of information from encrypted applications, is a global step forward in the fight against organized crime. “I think that a large number of criminal acts, including the murders of Sarajevo policemen, would very likely remain, if not completely uncovered, but certainly for a long period of time unexplained,” adds Mujanović.
Director of the Center for the Education of Judges and Prosecutors of FBiH Arben Murtezić believes that everything related to the Sky and Ana applications should be left to investigative and law-enforcement bodies: “A lot of things should not be mystified or guessed – I am deeply convinced that both the investigators and the prosecution are working on every important trace coming from those applications”.
The only allowed rate of tolerance towards organized crime is – zero, because only if everyone is the same before the law, the security of Bosnia and Herzegovina. societies could be satisfactory. Now, obviously, it’s not.
