On Friday night, Armin Berberovic killed young doctor Azra Spahic with a Mercedes. He had alcohol in his blood, was driving at an excessive speed and did not have a driver’s license. Azra died as a victim of Berberovic‘s night racing around the city. He has a number of violations and unpaid fines, but he still remains behind the wheel and without a valid driver’s license. Detention was proposed for him on Saturday.
Arrogant drivers behind the wheel
The case shook Sarajevo. Citizens protested on Sunday, left roses for Azra at the scene of her death, and demanded that the authorities take responsibility and take concrete steps to finally put an end to the racers and spoiled daddy’s boys who are rampaging around the city in expensive cars.
But Berberovic is just one of many examples of arrogant driversbehind the wheel in Sarajevo in recent years, because of which human lives have been lost.
It was night. On that fatal October in 2016 in Sarajevo, students Selma Agic and Edita Malkoc probably could not even have thought that stepping on the crosswalk near the student campus would be the last steps in their lives. Sanjin Sefic came by, driving at a speed of 106 kilometers per hour, and ran them down… He took two young lives. After the murder, he fled and even managed to cross the Serbian border. He was ultimately arrested in Serbia and extradited to Bosnia and Herzegovina(BiH).
The case of Sefic is just one of the numerous murders with tin weapons witnessed by Sarajevo and BiH. The profile of the perpetrators and the way the crime was committed were, as a rule, strikingly identical.
The Sefic case will fundamentally shake the BiH public, and everything will be accompanied by stiffening of penalties and changes to the Criminal Code. Sefic was ultimately sentenced to 16.5 years in prison.
Hit the tram stop with BMW
Kerim Mudzelet, driving on a rampage in a BMW in June 2015, at the tram stop near the Presidency, driving at a speed of about 100 kilometers per hour, killed Jelena Opricic, a citizen of Serbia who was visiting Sarajevo, and seriously injured one person. Pedestrians were not safe from him either on the sidewalk or at the tram stop, because the driver behind the wheel, due to the speed, lost control of the vehicle and crashed into the tram stop, taking a young life. Months before that,Mudzelet posted videos on social media showing him speeding in a BMW at insane speeds, which exceeded 200 kilometers per hour. He received seven years in prison.
A year earlier, in 2014, Semir Rastoder ran down Hava Dovadzija in the Sarajevo neighborhood of Nedzarici. Although he was convicted in several repeated cases, Rastoder, thanks to judicial trickery, managed to avoid serving his sentence until today.
Human lives
However, even just a few hours after Sefic‘s crime, on the main streets of Sarajevo, you could once again see dangerous driversspeeding in cars.
And while now politicians will pretend that they are doing something, and proposals will be “splashing” everywhere, which will not exclude even calls for the introduction of a police state, the cause of these problems is clear – it is a subculture of violence and arrogance whose protagonists are empty-headed young men with shaved heads who they feel mighty and powerful as they dash through the city, breaking laws and showing their power with impunity. Their means of execution are furious cars that they certainly did not earn for themselves.
There are not many members of such a subculture – a few dozen, at most hundreds – but the price of their violence is human lives.
Three girls died
Almir Ejubovic, a BMW driver, crashed into a metal pole on the A1 highway near Sarajevo on June 29th, 2018. He was sentenced to 15 years and 10 months in prison. 17-year-old Lejla Oruc, 16-year-old Nadja Neradin and 18-year-old Ajla Ibrica were killed in this accident, while the seriously injured Ajla Oruc woke up from a coma on July 13th.
In addition to the mentioned cases, which are the most memorable and which have disturbed the public, there are also numerous other accidents with fatal outcomes or serious injuries, whose perpetrators received minimal sentences or were never prosecuted, Avaz reports.
E.Dz.
