In retrial, most Balkan Warrior defendants found guilty
Ljubljana, 17 December - Thirteen of the fifteen defendants in the Balkan Warrior drug trafficking trial were found guilty as the retrial in the high-profile case ended at the Ljubljana District Court on 20 March. The remaining two defendants, Dejan Zupan and Sandra Udrih, were acquitted after being sentenced in the first trial.
Ljubljana
Balkan Warrior trial sentencing at the Ljubljana District Court on 20 March 2018.
Photo: Daniel Novakovič/STA
File photo
Chief defendant Dragan Tošić, whom the court found to have operated as the leader of the drug-trafficking ring with ties to Serb drug lord Darko Šarić, was found guilty of drug trafficking and racketeering and was given 16 and a half years in prison.
The sentences handed down by the panel of judges were lower than those sought by the prosecution. About a month after the verdict, four of the accused were also awarded compensation for inappropriate detention conditions.
The ring transported large amounts of cocaine from South America to Italy in 2008 and 2009 with the plan to sell it on. It tried to launder the money obtained from the activities through legal business operations and through real estate purchases.
In the original trial, which started in 2014, most of the 17 defendants of the time walked free following the suppression of wire-tapping evidence obtained in Slovenia and Serbia, but in the retrial the court admitted that evidence.
The suspects were arrested in May 2010 in a police sting mounted in cooperation with Serbian law enforcement authorities and the US Drug Enforcement Administration.
But the case is not completely closed yet, as one of the defendants in the original 2014 trial, Bosnian citizen Anes Selman, who was sentenced to ten years, succeeded with his appeal to the Constitutional Court, so his case was returned the Ljubljana District Court for a retrial at the end of July.