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Oliver Ivanovic in Belgrade in 2015. Photo: EPA-EFE/ANDREJ CUKIC.

The 48-page indictment, which has been obtained by BIRN, describes two well-known Kosovo Serbs from the divided town of Mitrovica, Milan Radoicic and Zvonko Veselinovic, as leaders of an “organised criminal group” responsible for the January 2018 murder of political party leader Oliver Ivanovic.

Radoicic, the vice-president of the main Belgrade-backed Kosovo Serb political party, Srpska Lista, is a businessman who is widely seen as the real power-holder in Serb-majority northern Kosovo.

He and Veselinovic are currently at large, and are wanted for arrest together with Zeljko Bojic, the former commander of Kosovo Police’s northern, Serb-majority region.

The indictment charges Nedeljko Spasojevic, Marko Rosic, Silvana Arsovic, Dragisa Markovic, Zarko Jovanovic and Rade Basara with involvement in the killing of Ivanovic.

Spasojevic, Markovic, Jovanovic and Basara were all Kosovo police officers before they were arrested.

The indictment alleges that Spasojevic, Rosic and Basara acted “as an organised criminal group together with Milan Radojicic, Zvonko Veselinovic and Zeljko Bojic, who are at large, and intentionally… participated in the criminal actions of the group knowing that such participation would contribute to realising the criminal activities of the group”.

“Each indictee has committed specific criminal acts and these acts resulted in the death of Oliver Ivanovic,” it claims.

Ivanovic, the leader of the Freedom, Democracy, Justice party, was gunned down in front of his party’s office in Mitrovica on January 16, 2018.

The indictment alleges that the criminal group has existed since 2011 and “has a structure and hierarchical roles with Zvonko Veselinovic and Milan Radoicic as leaders, while its members are indictees Nedeljko Spasojevic, Marko Rosic, Rade Basara and other persons”.

It claims that the group has committed criminal offences such as murder, assistance to murder, misuse of office and causing general danger.

It says that policeman Spasojevic, acting as a member of the criminal group, assisted the murder of Ivanovic “by creating conditions and removing obstacles to committing the murder… and taking unknown suspects to the Opel Astra car parked in a suburb of the city [Mitrovica], from which the murder was committed the next day”.

Rosic meanwhile followed “Oliver Ivanovic’s every move” before the murder, it claims.

Basara, another policeman, cooperated with the group via police commander Bojic and “hid evidence and was engaged by the criminal group to hide traces of the crime and to not shed light on cases which have to do with suspects belonging to Radoicic’s criminal group”, the indictment continues.

The indictment also alleges that Silvana Arsovic, a former administrative employee of Ivanovic’s party, the only person present in the office at the time of his murder, turned off the power so the closed-circuit television cameras did not work when Ivanovic was shot.

“This allowed the suspects to not be recorded by cameras when they committed the murder… while immediately after the murder, [she] activated the cameras at the [party] offices,” the indictment alleges.

Two other police officers, Markovic and Jovanovic, who were the first to reach the scene, according to the indictment, did not take measures to secure the scene “by allowing other persons to interfere at the scene, thus damaging the evidence”.

It claims that Jovanovic took a bullet casing found at the scene and put it in his pocket.

The Kosovo authorities arrested four individuals in relation to the case in November 2018.

They named Radoicic as a suspect, but he avoided arrest and moved to Serbia, where the authorities have asserted that he is innocent. He denies involvement in the murder of Ivanovic.

Once seen as a hardline nationalist, Ivanovic had evolved into a political moderate who advocated coexistence between Kosovo’s Serb minority and Albanian majority.

He had also become increasingly vocal in his criticism of the Belgrade government.

At the time of his death, he was being retried for ordering the murder of Kosovo Albanians during the war in Kosovo in 1999. He pleaded not guilty.