18. 05. 2011

Court sends journalist assault case to retrial

Belgrade, 18.05.2011. (B92) - The Court of Appeals in Belgrade on Wednesday announced that it had canceled the verdicts handed down to two men found guilty of attacking a journalist.

Milos Mladenovic and Danilo Zuza, who were originally each sentenced to three months in prison, will face a new trial.

In the night of July 24, 2010, the pair assaulted Vreme weekly columnist Teofil Pancic in a city bus in Belgrade, hitting him with metal bars and fists.

The court said today that Mladenovic and Zuza were aware of who they were attacking, and that the motive was Pancic's profession, or possibly disagreement with the content of his columns.

For this reason, said the statement, the first-degree ruling "could not have been examined in the part of the decision related to the criminal sanction".

Pancic reacted to the news by saying that a "bad verdict" had been canceled, but that the motive for such a decision was "unclear".

"I don't find the canceling of the ruling contentious per se, but the motive is, in other words, is the motive to determine the real truth, or to additionally water down even such a weak verdict," Pancic said in a statement for Beta news agency.

He added that the first-degree judgment did not take into consideration the fact that he was a journalist.

After the incident last summer, media checked Facebook profiles of the two then suspects and reported that they were both nationalists who belonged to right-wing groups.