Dorcol Shooting: Young Man Wounded, Attackers on the Run

A shooting in Belgrade’s Dorcol neighborhood has left a young man with a serious gunshot wound and police searching for two men who got away. O. V., 21, was shot in the stomach at close range at a tram turnaround on Vojvode Bojovica Boulevard. The attackers fled before the first patrol arrived.

News of the shooting broke on August 9. Police have not officially disclosed the exact time, though available accounts point to the late evening hours. The search for the attackers continued into the following day.

What happened at the tram turnaround

A group of young men was standing at the turnaround when two unknown men approached them. A verbal argument broke out first. It escalated into a physical fight, and one of the two pulled out a gun and fired.

The bullet hit O. V. in the stomach. His friends, F. G., 21, and A. S., 20, put the wounded man in a private car and drove straight to the hospital. His wound has been described as serious. No official statement has been issued on his condition since.

Why police only found out from the hospital

The wounded man was not taken by ambulance. His friends drove him themselves, in a private car, directly to the Emergency Center. Police were notified only after he arrived there.

That sequence was not a minor detail. In the time between the shot and the patrol’s arrival, no one from the group stayed behind at the scene. The immediate witnesses were gone, and the two attackers gained a head start. A gunshot wound that turns up at a hospital triggers a report on its own, and that is how the case reached police in the first place.

A shell casing and an unfired round

Officers secured the scene quickly. During the on site examination, investigators found one spent shell casing and one unfired round. For now, those are the only physical evidence mentioned.

There is no official description of the attackers, no names, and no weapon has been recovered. That puts the weight of the investigation on camera footage. Investigators are reviewing surveillance cameras around the boulevard and the approaches to the turnaround, a stretch of Dorcol that sees tram and car traffic all day.

Work on the case is now moving in three directions:

• reviewing surveillance footage from nearby buildings and roads
• searching for the two attackers, who remain at large
• checking earlier cases involving people connected to the fight

Drug records complicate the picture

The theory of an unprovoked attack ran into a counterweight as soon as investigators checked the men’s records. All three young men, the one who was shot and his two friends, have prior drug related records. According to unofficial information, investigators are for that reason also looking into a possible score settling within the illegal drug trade.

That has not been confirmed. The motive is not yet known at this stage, and the preliminary criminal proceedings still have to establish it. Until the attackers are identified, the legal classification of the offense also remains open, and will depend on the medical findings about the injury and on what the footage shows.

The prior records do serve a practical purpose. They give investigators a list of names, addresses and connections from older cases, which narrows the pool of people to check faster than if two random strangers had gotten into a fight. This is a matter of verification, not of guilt, since no one has been named a suspect at this point.

The turnaround on Vojvode Bojovica Boulevard is an open, busy spot lined with apartment buildings and shops. A gunshot there does not go unnoticed. If the cameras produce a face or a license plate, the search moves from description to concrete names, and the Dorcol shooting turns from an unexplained incident into a case with suspects.