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.

But by the time most Novosti readers had reached his story, Pantic was dead, gunned down that morning outside his apartment building on his way back from the local shop. He was 47 years old.

Twenty years on, the murder remains unresolved.

“We are standing still and making no progress,” said journalist Veran Matic, chairman of a commission created in 2012 to investigate a string of unresolved murders under the rule of late Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic and, in the case of Pantic, immediately after it.

“If I could, I would gladly tell you the names of all actors, but I still hope that a solution will be found for the case to be resolved,” Matic said ahead of the 20th anniversary of Pantic’s death.

Case still open

Entrance of building where Milan Pantic lived, police crime scene photo.

Pantic died exactly eight months after Milosevic’s ouster, when a disparate coalition of reformers, nationalists and opportunists was wrestling with the legacy of a decade of war, sanctions and organised crime.

Matic, who co-founded the iconic Belgrade radio station B92 as a voice of resistance to Milosevic’s policies and became a fierce champion of media freedom, has traced Pantic’s killing to his coverage of the privatisation of the Novi Popovac cement factory in the Morava basin town of Paracin.

Matic, in his statement, said that what Pantic “wrote and what he would have written” about the sale had cost him his life.

Pantic’s wife, Zivka, was cited in the Serbian weekly Vreme at the time as saying that Pantic and the family had received threatening phone calls, some of them “remaining recorded on the answering machine.”

Nino Brajovic, the general secretary of the Journalists’ Association of Serbia, UNS, who had known Pantic for some five years before his death, said that journalists interviewed by police at the time said the authorities behaved “professionally”, that they trawled through Pantic’s articles and “were practically on the trail of who did it.”

“But it is obvious that there was no readiness [to go further],” Brajovic told BIRN. The fact no one has been held accountable shows “that the state was not ready to solve this grave crime immediately after the democratic changes in Serbia.”

He described Pantic as “a shining example of a journalist whose mission is to fight crime and corruption at the local level.”

Matic, however, described the crime scene investigation after the murder as “amateurish”.

The case has been investigated several times since; the latest probe is still open at the Higher Public Prosecutor’s Office in Jagodina.

“The Higher Public Prosecutor’s Office in Jagodina, in cooperation with the working group of the Ministry of the Interior, is undertaking all actions under the law to shed light on this crime, but so far the perpetrator or perpetrators have not been identified,” the office told BIRN in a written statement for this story.

Aides to assassinated PM investigated

Cement factory in Novi Popovac. Photo: Wikipedia/CrniBombarder!!!

The cement factory was sold the year after Pantic’s death to a Swiss firm called Holcim.

In 2003, Serbia’s reformist prime minister, Zoran Djindjic, was assassinated by an organised crime gang that included a number of former elite police officers, and in 2004 public prosecutors launched an investigation against four people concerning the cement factory sale, including the factory director at the time, Darko Krizan, the chairman of the board and former Djindjic aide Nemanja Kolesar and an adviser to Djindjic called Zoran Janjusevic.

Prosecutors alleged that Kolesar and Krizan had struck a deal with Holcim in 2001, at the time the public tender for the privatisation of the factory was announced, to ensure that Holcim’s firm, Breitenburger, would be chosen.

The case was dropped in 2010 without any charges being brought.

Everything Matic’s commission found “shows that there was no readiness,” said Brajovic. “On the contrary, the then authorities dictated what should be done when it came to the privatisation of the Popovac cement factory, that his writing about the privatisation was the direct reason for the murder of Milan Pantic.”

Both Matic and Brajovic said that special organised crime prosecutors in Belgrade should take on the case, something the Prosecutor’s Office for Organised Crime rejected.

“Our prosecutor’s office inspected the case files of the Higher Public Prosecutor’s Office in Jagodina in connection with the Milan Pantic murder and after the inspection it was determined that there are no grounds for suspicion that the act was committed by an organised criminal group, which is a necessary condition for the case to pass into our jurisdiction,” the office said in a written response to BIRN.