Serbian Interior Ministry

The Serbian authorities granted citizenship to former Bosnian Serb military policeman Mirko Vrucinic in June 2020 - two months before his defence was due to present its closing arguments in his war crimes trial, BIRN has learned.

While Serbian officials continue to downplay the role of the Interior Minister's father in the arms trade, documents obtained by BIRN reveal his high-level activities in this field.

They show that Branko Stefanovic, father of Interior Minister Nebojsa Stefanovic, traveled in May to the "Bereta" arms factory in Italy as part of a Serbian Interior Ministry delegation, for example.

Behgjet Pacolli said on Tuesday that he has given the Kosovo prosecution "thousands of materials that prove the Serbian genocidal policy against Kosovo" and offer evidence of mass killings by the Yugoslav Army, the Serbian Interior Ministry, Belgrade-controlled paramilitaries and local armed groups during the Kosovo war.

The prosecution in the retrial of former Serbian State Security officials Jovica Stanisic and Franko Simatovic at the Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals in The Hague argued on Tuesday that defence witness Dragoslav Krsmanovic gave different evidence to the court than when he first testified at the original trial in 2011, putting his credibility in question.

He said to the press that the woman is under police custody (up to 48 hours), while it is expected that she will be charged for a serious crime, for which the prosecution will request detention.

A defence witness in the war crimes retrial of former Serbian state security officials Jovica Stanisic and Franko Simatovic said on Tuesday that the State Security Service, SDB, that they led was not involved in establishing a training camp in a Serb breakaway statelet in Croatia in 1991.

 A giant Kosovo flag in the centre of Pristina in June. Photo: EPA/VALDRIN XHEMAJ

"On this specific case, the Gjilan/Gnjilane Prosecution's Department for Serious Crimes, yesterday, on July 10, 2019, detained two persons of Serb nationality on the suspicion that they have committed the criminal offence of espionage," said Liridona Xheladini from the Gjilan/Gnjilane prosecution.

Lawyer Wayne Jordash told the Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals as the trial resumed on Tuesday that the defence will call witnesses who will confirm that Jovica Stanisic, the former chief of the Serbian state security service, was not in command of Serbian paramilitary or police units in Bosnia or Croatia during the war, as the indictment claims.

Djordjevic, a law graduate, joined the police and rose to the position of assistant minister at the Serbian Interior Ministry in September 1996. The following year, he was made a colonel-general, which was the highest rank at the time.

Serbia's Prosecutor's Office for Organized Crime said it is awaiting more extensive expertise before deciding whether to take on the case of man recently arrested by the police and allegedly planning a terrorist attack.

The man in questi0n, Armin Alibasic, was arrested on January 13 in the southwest Serbian city of Novi Pazar in Serbia's mainly Muslim Sandzak region.