Serbian Former Police Official’s Arrest ‘Politically Motivated’ – Lawyer

The arrest last Friday in Serbia of Dijana Hrkalovic, a former state secretary at the Interior Ministry, who has been linked to a notorious crime gang, the "Janjicari", is politically motivated, and she is being used as a scapegoat, Sead Spahovic, her lawyer, told BIRN.

"The pro-government tabloids are spreading a lot of lies in recent days about her arrest. Most of that it is not true. They were praising her in previous years; now they are demonizing her, shifting the blame from the real culprits to her. She is just a scapegoat," Spahovic said.

Hrkalovic, 34, left her position as an Interior Ministry state secretary in 2019 under unclear circumstances. She was arrested on Friday on suspicion of trading in influence and will remain in custody for 30 days.

Media have claimed that she was arrested for hiding evidence in a murder case in 2017, known as the "Railway murder", for which Veljko Belivuk, leader of the Janjicari, was accused.

Spahovic, however, said she was accused only of not delivering telephone conversations on time, before the start of the murder trial. "In connection with this event, she is solely charged with delivering a report late," Spahovic said.

He added that the only other thing that she is being charged for is that she removed a fragment of a phone conversation between a well-known lawyer, Dragoslav Ognjanovic, who was murdered in July 2018, and a Dragoslav Miloradovic, an associate of Luka Bojovic, an organized crime gang leader currently in jail in Spain. In that conversation, the two of them had allegedly mentioned her name.

Ognjanovic was a lawyer for Luka Bojovic, whose criminal clan was in war with Belivuk's Janjicari.

Spahovic accused the tabloids of having spread false information about...

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