Kosovo charges 6 over murder of moderate Serb politician

Pristina:  Kosovo prosecutors have charged six people with assisting in the murder two years ago of local Serb politician Oliver Ivanovic, a rare moderate who spoke out against organised crime.

Ivanovic, one of few in Kosovo's Serb minority to break ranks with Belgrade, was gunned down with six bullets to the back in January 2018 just outside his party's headquarters in North Mitrovica.

Six suspects, working as "a criminal group with an organised structure", have been charged with "helping unknown suspects to commit the murder", the prosecutor's office in Pristina said in a statement.

The group was seeking "financial or other material benefit, with the aim of extending control over businesses and politics in northern Mitrovica", the statement added.

Mitrovica, a city that is ethnically split with Serbs in the north and Albanians in the south, is known as a hotbed of organised crime, a plague that Ivanovic tried to expose.

Among those charged are three Kosovo Serb policemen who attempted "to hide and eliminate evidence" when they reached the crime scene, the prosecutor said.

Two were detained in a raid last year, while the third is still at large.

Also on the list was one of Ivanovic's close party associates, who has been questioned over the case.

"The defendant was aware that security cameras in the party offices were forcibly shut off... thereby enabling the suspects not to be recorded by the security cameras when the murder" took place, the statement said, providing only the suspect's initials, S.A.

Two other defendants are at large.

The indictment did not name Milan Radoicic, a local Serb businessman and political leader who fled Kosovo for Belgrade last year and who was considered a suspect throughout the investigation.

Pristina had issued an international arrest warrant for Radoicic in connection with the murder in July.

Ivanovic did not recognise Kosovo's independence from Belgrade, declared by the former province in 2008.

But he was considered unusual among his ilk for efforts to build bridges with Kosovo Albanians, whose language he also spoke.

He had long maintained that crime, not ethnic divides, was the biggest curse in impoverished Mitrovica.

In off-the-record comments to media made public after his death, Ivanovic described how "informal centres of power" were calling the shots in the Serb half of Mitrovica.

He named Radoicic as a key player in this underworld.