Minister of Interior Affairs Montenegro Danilo Šaranović stated at the parliamentary session held on Monday that the recently arrested Ivan Delić is charged with the murder of Goran Žugić back in 2000.
Ivan Delić, known as Iso, is linked to the very top of the Montenegrin underground, more precisely to the fugitive leader of the Kavački clan. Radoj Zvicer. According to the international warrant, Delic was arrested in mid-May in Dubai, and escorted by strong police forces to Podgorica detention units.
Previously, in the middle of last year, he escaped arrest during the international police action "General", in which several members of the Kavački clan fell. However, he was indicted a few months later for smuggling 2.5 tons of cocaine from South America to Europe and Australia.
Since then, like Switzerland, he has been on the run.
Who liquidated whom on whose orders
According to the Montenegrin minister, who refers to the operational knowledge of the police, Delić liquidated Žugić on the order of Darko Raspopović Belog, then the head of one of the administrations of the State Security Service (SDB), as well as Bran Mićunović (who died last year), a controversial businessman close to the Đukanović family. All three were allegedly accused of participation in the murder by the former driver and bodyguard of Bran Mićunović.
Beli himself met a similar fate only a year later, when an unknown perpetrator fired seven bullets at him in the middle of Podgorica while he was removing bags from the trunk of his car.
Goran Žugić was the national security advisor to the then Prime Minister of Montenegro, Milo Đukanović. Based on the writings of the media and the statements of state officials, it was believed that he fell as a victim (or in the reckoning) of the tobacco mafia, in which he allegedly took too much interest.
In the early 2000s, the Croatian weekly "Nacional" mentioned Žugić and Raspopović in a series of articles about the tobacco mafia, and their names were also among the evidence before the Italian court. The editor-in-chief of "Nacional" Ivo Pukanić was killed by a car bomb in 2008 - it is assumed that he was another victim of this lucrative state business.
Delic was linked in the media to the murder of the Federal Minister of Defense Pavlo Bulatović in Belgrade in 2000, but no indictment has been brought to this day.
The murder of Belo Raspopović was never solved either. The conflict within the tobacco mafia and the SDB structures close to them was mentioned as one of the motives. That is, Raspopović's liquidation was interpreted as the removal of an inconvenient witness to tobacco smuggling in the 1990s, in the period when the Montenegrin SDB assumed primacy in relation to structures loyal to the federal service.
Awaiting the verdicts
For years, murders linked to the tobacco mafia remained unsolved. The editor-in-chief of "Dana" Duško Jovanović was killed in 2004, after a series of articles about cigarette smuggling, and just one year later, the head of the criminal police department, Slavoljub Šćekić, who investigated numerous affairs, including the murder of Jovanović, was killed. Even though he was outside the country, Delić was also questioned by the police after the murder of Duško Jovanović.
So far, the Montenegrin Special Prosecutor's Office has done a solid job, but there is still practically no final epilogue - which certainly falls outside their scope of work.
It remains to be seen whether the promised fight against organized crime will end with adequate verdicts.
Big summer discount on "Vreme"! Just click here, choose a subscription and support the editorial staff in their independent work.
