Five Days After Vučić's Fall, Prosecutors Have Reportedly Remembered Radoičić: Why Did the Banjska Suspect Stay Out of Custody?

For three years the Banjska case looked in Belgrade like something forgotten in a drawer. Then Serbia voted, Vučić fell, and five days later, according to information that came out in Serbian media, Supreme Public Prosecutor Zagorka Dolovac ordered a commission of her office to put the case against Milan Radoičić under the microscope too.

According to those reports, particular attention is on one question: why Radoičić, a suspect in organising the armed clash in Banjska in northern Kosovo, stayed out of custody after questioning at the Higher Public Prosecutor's Office in Belgrade, despite the gravity of the charges against him. We were unable to find official confirmation from the prosecutors.

A reminder of what we're talking about. On 24 September 2023, one Kosovo police officer and three Serbs were killed near Banjska. Radoičić took responsibility for the incident through a lawyer, and at the start of October a Belgrade court refused to order his detention: it took his travel document, banned him from going to Kosovo and sent him home. In April this year a court in Pristina handed down life sentences to Blagoje Spasojević and Vladimir Tolić and 30 years to Dušan Maksimović. They were convicted, while the man who himself said he was behind the incident lived freely in Serbia.

Hero or suspect

The reaction was immediate. Editors close to Vučić proclaimed him a "Serbian hero of Banjska" and are talking about a "hunt" for him. Vučić himself said that handing Radoičić over to Pristina "would mean the end of Serbia's existence" and formal legal recognition of Kosovo.

Notice the jump. The news is about whether someone made the right call on detention in Belgrade. In what has come out publicly there's not a word about extradition. But mention Pristina and everyone forgets the question of who let the man go, and why.

Dolovac, for that matter, is no new figure who came in with the students. She has headed Serbia's prosecution service since before Vučić came to power. If the case has a problem, that problem was made while she was running the office. Was the case this problematic before 25 October too, or did it become problematic when the election winner changed?

A test for the students

For the new government, whenever there is one, Radoičić is the first real test on Kosovo. The student list is divided as it is: for some, Kosovo is "temporarily occupied", for others Serbia can do without it. A trial in Belgrade will open exactly that wound, except this time beneath the rhetoric of treason will lie a case with four dead people.

Does Serbia have institutions that try their own "heroes", or do they try them only once their protector falls? And does a prosecutor's office anywhere in the Balkans wake up before an election rather than after it?