Enemy of the State: How a Serbian Journalist Became a Shooting Target

"When I came to [daily newspaper] Borba in 1990, he was a reporter and political analyst, and known for writing a couple of pamphlets, one of which I remember was about the people from Goli Otok [political prison in Socialist Yugoslavia]," Gunjic recalled.

"Slavko Curuvija was one of the best journalists at that Borba, which was an old newsroom which employed, as far as I remember, 200 journalists," he told BIRN.

Curuvija, who was born in 1949, was shot dead on April 11, 1999 in broad daylight in central Belgrade. Belgrade Higher Court will deliver its verdict in the retrial of four men accused of involvement in the crime on Thursday.

The original indictment did not identify who ordered the killing, but only said Radomir Markovic, then head of Serbian State Security, abetted the crime, and three security service officers - Ratko Romic, Milan Radonjic and Miroslav Kurak - took part in the organisation and execution of the murder. Kurak was initially named as the direct perpetrator, and Romic as his accomplice.

Markovic, Radonjic and Romic pleaded not guilty, while Kurak is on the run and is being tried in absentia.

When it came to who committed the murder, the first-instance verdict in the trial in April 2019 diverged from the indictment by saying that the journalist was killed by an "unknown perpetrator", rather than by Kurak.

The introduction of the "unknown perpetrator" into the verdict was why the Belgrade Appeals Court quashed it and ordered a retrial.

Curuvija was one of several victims of political assassination during the rule of Slobodan Milosevic in the 1990s and the second journalist to be killed.

The trial established that he had been followed for months by Milosevic's security...