A certain citizen from Jajinac called the police one afternoon and said that he noticed a suspicious object (or objects, it is not clear) in the forest near his house. There is the approach to the family house of the Vučić family, where you should turn off the Avalski puta, a narrow path through the forest. The police came to the scene, saw suspicious objects (one or more? it is not known), so the pyrotechnic and forensic team was called and the scene was secured, all with the accompanying crowd and noise, blue lights and sirens. The following was found: one manual rocket launcher of the "zolja" type (64 mm, known in the West as LAW), four hand grenades of an unknown model and about a hundred pieces of shooting ammunition, some of which are for "snipers", if we understood correctly. The ammunition was in some packaging, we don't know if it was original from the factory. We assume that the "oil" was in the original plastic protective film, although this is not stated; as a rule, hand grenades come in their green plastic boxes, but that was not specifically mentioned either.
Someone, therefore, left those weapons there in the forest for some reason. An appropriate panic and uproar immediately arose, as the event was announced by all mouths and all media. And the attempt to assassinate the prime minister, and the incompetent security services, and how is it possible, etc. There was a moral panic and "excitement", as usual. The Minister of Internal Affairs Stefanović, Dr. Nebojša, soon stated that these weapons originated "from the battlefields in Croatia and BiH" - without indicating where he got such an assessment from. Perhaps, as some media reports, because the sign says "Mirkovci 1991".
WHICH IS SO FUNNY: Now we have to go slowly and from the beginning. Manual rocket launchers have their own individual serial number, so it is possible to establish their biography from the factory to the one who last commissioned it - if records were kept about it in the JNA and MUP of Serbia, and we know that it is mostly not, as well as for most of the weapons, ammunition and explosives from 1991 onwards. All of this was shared with a shovel without any borrowing or records. Therefore, Dr. Stefanović's assumption is not implausible, unless... Other possible indicators could be data on the years of production of those assets. Hand grenades do not have an individual serial number, but they do have a serial number and year of manufacture; ammunition in most cases has the manufacturer's code and the year of production on the bottom of the shell. If those indicators point to a period before 1995, for example, Dr. Stefanović's assumption is likely, unless... Unless the years of production are of a more recent date, let's say from 2001 onwards.
Well, now: the tactical assumption that the weapons were left in the Jajnačka forest for the sake of a possible assassination of Prime Minister Aleksandar Vučić, because there is an inconvenient turn towards the family house, so the convoy needs to slow down a lot, it doesn't hold up very well. Good: "Zolja" is a vicious weapon and will destroy any armored vehicle, right up to the T-34 tank, which it failed to penetrate in the Vietnam War. One "zolja", however, is not enough for a possible ambush and assassination of the prime minister. Aleksandar Vučić travels in a convoy of several very similar vehicles, with an advance guard and a "counter-escort" (security behind the main convoy, which makes sure that no one follows the prime minister). Hand grenades are always useful and that is not in dispute. The question remains: why were there no small arms, automatic rifles and snipers at the scene? Somehow, it does not seem likely that possible assassins of the Prime Minister would bring empty guns to the Jajinac forest and load them on the spot.
The banal assumption remains: that the weapon was left by someone who intended to resell it later - or get rid of it, because he didn't want to go to the police with it to hand it over under the amnesty line; there is a lot, so some questions could not be avoided. According to Dr. Stefanovic, the police took biological traces (DNA), but they turned out to be "partial" (overlaid on top of each other; see Mini interview: Partial inference). Allegedly, at least three persons rummaged through that "zola" and "packages" with ammunition. It is interesting that Prime Minister Vučić was the first to mention "partial traces" even before the forensic findings. The Prime Minister said that if there are partial traces, then the matter is amateurish; if there are none, then it is serious, because the owners of those weapons are not "doctors of science", so they don't leave a trace. Good: now we know they are not "PhDs". Speaking to RTS from the old and rich Hanseatic city of Hamburg, the prime minister could hardly refrain from laughing while talking about the case of the found weapon. We don't know what was so funny to him, but we suspect...
ELEMENTARY POLICE: Let's get back to serious questions. If someone hid something in the Jajina Forest, there was a possibility that they would come back for it. One can't help but remember that comedy from the "Borik" hall in Banja Luka, when some weapons were found that the donkey had prepared there to resell later, so it turned out that it was an "assassination attempt" on Boris Tadić and Milet Dodika, with accompanying panic and clamor. The basic tactical criminal assumption was that someone would come for it - sooner or later. That means things would have gone differently than this weekend. Something like this:
Upon the mere information that a suspicious object or objects were found here and there, and the location is near the road that the Prime Minister occasionally uses, a thoughtful policeman would order the citizen to remain silent and sit until he arrives. He would come in civilian clothes, alone, in an inconspicuous civilian car and look at the scene. In the meantime, he would also provide inconspicuous surveillance by plainclothes police officers, if possible by pairs of boys and girls, to monitor the scene, pretending to be loving couples. Upon inspection of the contents of the case, he would request plainclothes reinforcements and electronic surveillance - all on the probable assumption that whoever left it would come for it. There are - since the Vietnam War - electronic devices that detect movement and send sound from a given location, and this should not be a technical problem for our services. With a little patience, with masked sniper teams or one team (probably enough), with a little freezing and discreet surveillance - if someone went back to get their weapons, they'd be caught without a problem. If no one appeared for a while (the longer the better), it would mean that someone left the weapon forever, to get rid of it. Installing discreet surveillance cameras would also be helpful, if they have night capability, of course, and we know modern devices do.
Instead of that elementary procedure, panic was immediately created with the accompanying circus, because propaganda was always more important to this government than criminal investigation. Thus, the last chance for someone to return and get the weapons and fall into the hands of the police was destroyed. Partial DNA traces are not worth much there. The announced analyzes of GSM telephone connections in the surrounding base stations may bring some clues - if the owners of the weapons found in the Jajina forest were stupid enough to carry cell phones with them while bringing the crate (or crates). And if they didn't? Maybe they are not "doctors of science", as Prime Minister Vučić said, but maybe they are not so stupid to bring phones to such a job.
REAL QUESTION: And what do we have now? We have another weekend of nervousness and panic, only to hear from the Prime Minister and the Minister of the Interior that there is little chance that the issue of those weapons will ever be clarified, which was funny to the Prime Minister, but not to Dr. Stefanović and it shouldn't be. Then there was a story about how, well, the prime minister is going to step down from the position of coordinator of the security services, because, allegedly, he is not satisfied with their work. Well, he was their boss all along, so now he's leaving because they didn't do well? Various analysts later indulged in stories about who should provide security for the Prime Minister closely, who from the outside, and who through counterintelligence, as if those people from three different services (MUP, BIA, VBA) had to constantly patrol the Jajnačka forest in the hope that they find a suspicious box, not some neighbor from the area. Events like this, like this one with the box, are simply not predictable and the people from the services should not be blamed for not foreseeing them. God and Kobra know where the Prime Minister drives around the city and the surrounding area; so what? Should every lawn, park, parked car, manhole and anything else be checked? Each threat assessment has its own logic and limits that keep it on this side of paranoia. In these affairs, the real question is not who brought some weapons to the Jajinac forest; the real question is: who would have an interest and benefit in attempting to assassinate the prime minister? This is called a threat assessment, and it is primarily the job of the BIA and the VBA, which continues to protect Prime Minister Vučić. And such an assessment is made on the basis of conscientious and thorough intelligence efforts. Threats of this kind are faced by responsible people at their source with good intelligence work, not with subsequent "partial" analyzes of weapons already found, with the complete compromise of all chances that the owners of the weapons will ever be found.
