Former DS mayor says Belivuk group changed election outcome

Belivuk and a number of his close associates were arrested on charges of murder and drug trafficking. Belivuk told prosecutors that he had close ties to the authorities, especially with President Aleksandar Vucic and Internal Affairs Minister Aleksandar Vulin.

Janko Djuric, a founding member of the DS and former Vladimirovci municipal mayor, told this week’s issue of NIN that the coalition around Vucic’s Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) lost two local council members who defected to the opposition. He recalled that SNS members walked out of the constitutive session of the local council and added that masked men with rifles stopped opposition council members from entering the building. He said a new session was called but that the SNS bused in activists and a group of men in clown costumes who tried to start fights.

Djuric said that he learned later that year that the costumed men were Partizan FC supporters including the leaders of the Belivuk group. “We learned that from a police officer, one of my students who said that he met a fellow officer escorting the Partizan supporters. The police officer said that Belivuk and his associate Aleksandar Stankovic were not in Vladimirovci but their men were.

Djuric said that he learned that they went to at least 20 other municipalities after the 2016 elections to do the same.