“Bullet for both” or “Hawthorn stake” for both, are some of the threats from the Telegram channel “Rebellion is a state of mind”(”Bunt je stanje duha”), where on Tuesday, April 16th, a video of the meeting of Christopher Hill, the United States (U.S.)ambassador to Serbia, was shared, with journalist and professor of the Faculty of Philosophy in Novi Sad Dinko Gruhonjic.
The American ambassador visited the Faculty of Philosophy in Novi Sad fifteen days after members of several right-wing groups – Eko Chetniks, the Serbian Royal Youth of Novi Sad and the Association of Students of the Republika Srpska (RS) – blocked the Faculty of Philosophy for four days demanding the resignation of professor Dinko Gruhonjic.
They accused Gruhonjic of allegedly spreading hatred because of public appearances in which he criticized the growth of nationalist narratives in Serbia, but also because of a maliciously edited statement from his guest appearance in Dubrovnik last year.
In a video that was shared on social networks, Gruhonjicallegedly glorifies the Ustashi criminal Dinko Sakic, and that impression was achieved by editing the video, i.e. not broadcasting a part of the conversation in which Gruhonjiccomments in an ironic tone that they made up the name Sabahudin even though they could have discredited him because of the name Dinko.
In the last two months, Dinko Gruhonjic and his colleagues from the Independent Journalists’ Association of Vojvodina (NDNV) have received thousands of threats sent via the Internet, and now the American ambassador in Serbia has been attacked with similar content and intensity.
The U.S. Embassy has not publicly announced the threats against Ambassador Hill.
The Prosecutor’s Office for High-Tech Crime explained that this prosecutor’s office ex officio formed a case related to the threats addressed to the U.S. Ambassador to Serbia Christopher Hill and the journalist Dinko Gruhonjic.
“Police officers of the Service for the fight against high-tech crime have been sent a request to collect the necessary information,” according to the Prosecutor’s Office for High-Tech Crime.
Who is threatening Hill?
By looking into some of the most followed right-wing and pro-Russian channels on the Telegram network, it was found out that direct death threats were sent from at least four accounts.
The threats were sent via the telegram group “Rebellion is a state of mind” which is followed by over 80,000 people, and was launched in 2020. According to the data of TGStat, the channel catalog and Telegram groups, which provides insight into their analytical data and provides the possibility of monitoring, this group most often shares the content of the “Serbskij Vestnik” channel, which publishes content in Russian on the subject of Serbia and the Balkans.
An edited photo of Ambassador Hill in the crosshairs of a sniper, as well as the threats “I would kill this Hill in cold blood without a shred of conscience” and “Kill Hill” were published in comments on the Telegram account of Dejan Beric, a Serbian citizen who fought as a sniper on the side of pro-Russian separatists in Donetsk, Ukraine.
The channel has almost 110,000 members, Slobodna Evropa reports.
E.Dz.
