STA, March 12, 2018 – A retrial in the high-profile Balkan Warrior drug trafficking case is slowly coming to an end with the closing arguments of defence attorneys under way at the Ljubljana District Court almost eight years after a police raid that busted the allegedly biggest drug trafficking gang in Slovenia.
Charges in the case were brought against 17 persons, including chief defendant Dragan Tošić, who were arrested in the sting carried out in cooperation with Serbian police and the US Drug Enforcement Administration.
But the prosecution dropped charges against two suspects in the retrial: against Zdenka Kondić after the Higher Court threw out evidence related to her, and against Bosnian citizen Anes Selman, who was found guilty in the first trial but escaped to Bosnia immediately after the sentencing. He is currently in prison in Bosnia on unrelated marijuana growing charges.
The charges against the ring came in the aftermath of an arrest in Uruguay in October 2009 of two men trying to smuggle 2.17 tonnes of cocaine to the Mediterranean.
In the first trial, four members of the ring, considered only footsoldiers, were convicted by the Ljubljana District Court in November 2012 on the basis of evidence collected in Italy.
The court however acquitted the remaining 13 after the panel of judges threw out wiretapping evidence from Slovenia and Serbia that it said had been obtained unlawfully.
But the Ljubljana Higher Court annulled the acquittals in November 2013 and ordered a retrial, after the same court had already increased the sentences of the four defendants who had been found guilty.
In the pre-trial hearings, which started in June 2014, almost all requests from the defence for exclusion of evidence were rejected.
Tošić's attorney insisted on the exclusion of evidence from Slovenia, Serbia, Italy and Uruguay, the very same evidence that the Higher Court ordered admissible when it overturned the acquittals in the original trial.
In the retrial, the first-instance court has heard all the evidence again and a completely new judging panel has to rule on the matter. Since the Higher Court also annulled the racketeering counts, all 17 defendants have been on trial for the charge.
The prosecution is seeking similar sentences as in the initial trial, when it sought prison terms ranging from two years behind bars for one defendant to 19 years and 10 months for chief defendant Tošić.
After almost two years, the retrial is now coming to a close. Prosecutors Blanka Žgajnar and Mateja Gončin already delivered their closing arguments last week. Tošić's lawyer also delivered part of his closing argument last week, but he is scheduled to continue this week, as is the rest of defence.
It could be made clear by the end of this month when the court delivers the ruling.
