Serbian Mayor Will File Charges to Expose ‘Liars Targeting President’

The mayor of the northern Serbian city of Novi Sad, Milos Vucevic, a senior official in Serbia's ruling Serbian Progressive Party, SNS, will file an as yet unnamed criminal charge on Tuesday against President Aleksandar Vucic, the party announced on Monday - with a view to clearing the President's reputation and exposing the "mafia octopus" that the mayor says has Vucic in its sights.

This development comes after an arrested crime gang leader, Veljko Belivuk, claimed he had not only met Vucic but that the Serbian president had asked him various favours.

Belivuk, known as "Velja Nevolja" ("Velja the Trouble"), was arrested at the beginning of February along with other gang members. He was the leader of the so-called Janjicari, (Janissaries), later renamed "Principi", a notorious crime gang hiding behind the persona of a football fan group.

Formed in 2013, it developed connections to private security contractors but also to state officials including a senior police adviser and the secretary-general of the Serbian government.

According to the SNS press release, Vucevic will file charges so that people can "clearly see all the evidence in court, who is lying, why they are doing so, all the tentacles of this mafia octopus, the connection of this monstrous criminal clan with various political and other centres of power, after which it will be unequivocally clear to the whole public that all the time the common target was President Vucic".

Vucic himself announced on Sunday that he and Interior Minister Aleksandar Vulin - also mentioned in the testimonies of arrested alleged clan members - will "find one of our colleagues to do that, [bring a criminal case] in order to present everything that those people said".