Veran Matić

BELGRADE - Threats to journalists are absolutely impermissible and intimidation directed at all Tanjug journalists needs to be taken very seriously, says Veran Matic, who heads a commission set up by the Serbian government to investigate killings of journalists.

The Chairman of Serbia's Commission for Investigating Murders of Journalists during Slobodan Milosevic's regime, Veran Matic, told BIRN that investigators still face grave risks doing their job.

The author was Milan Pantic, the paper's correspondent in the town of Jagodina, some 130 kilometres south of the capital, Belgrade, and from where Pantic wrote regularly about the crossover between privatisation and corruption.

The murder of "Vecernje novosti" correspondent from Jagodina, Milan Pantic, took place on June 11, 2001.

The death occurred under unexplained circumstances, it was confirmed by the findings of domestic forensic experts, and the forensic scientists at the Hague Institute.
According to the forensic findings, Dada Vujasinovic's death "may have occurred as a consequence of murder, suicide or accident."

Director of the Samizdat B92 publisher Veran Matic announced this on Thursday.

The attack was in this way extended to publisher and journalist Slavko Curuvija, 20 years after his murder, and several days after a verdict was passed, sentencing those who carried the crime out to a total of a hundred years in prison, the commission said.

The killing and kidnapping of journalists in Kosovo in the period from 1998 to 2000, the period that encompasses the mandate of the Specialist Chambers for KLA crimes must be the topic of the investigation of the Specialist Prosecutor's Office and prosecuted at the Specialist Chambers.

The citizens of Serbia are much more humane than the data and trends show, we want to make it more real and more visible, Veran Matic said at the beginning of the interview.

Veran Matic, the president of the Commission Investigating Murders of Journalists, has been an inevitable target over the past month and a half in a special war of sorts, that weekly Ilustrovana Politika has been waging.