Serbia Urged To Get Tough After Gang Killings

Serbian criminologist Dobrivoje Radovanovic has warned that Serbia must cooperate more effectively with Montenegro and step up its attempts to combat violent crime after another murder of a Montenegrin citizen in Belgrade.

"Better cooperation between Serbia and Montenegro would help," Radovanovic told BIRN. 

"They should arrest criminals and give them severe punishments, and also prevent them from crossing the border with the feeling that they are untouchable," he added. 

Serbian media reported on June 1 that the dead body of Radovan Laketic from the Montenegrin town of Pljevlja was found in bushes in Belgrade. 

Belgrade newspaper Vecernje novosti reported that Laketic, killed with six gunshots, was already known to the Serbian police as he had served eight years in prison for drug trafficking. 

His death was the last in a series of murders of Montenegrins citizens in what has been described as a conflict between two rival crime gangs from the Montenegrin coastal resort town of Kotor, Kavac and Skaljari, that has spilled in neighboring Serbia.

In April, Serbian Interior Minister Nebojsa Stefanovic, insisted that Serbia will not be a battlefield for warring Montenegrin drug gangs and said that anyone who could endanger the country's security will be barred from entering, Tanjug news agency reported.

His statement came after Montenegrin citizen Dalibor Despotovic, who used to work as a bodyguard for the businessman Slobodan Saranovic, was also killed in Belgrade in February.

A month earlier, Davorin Baltic, who media alleged was a member of one of the Montenegrin narcotics gangs, was murdered in the Serbian capital. 

In June 2016, the body of Goran Ducic, who was a bodyguard for one of...