Danka Ilic Murder Case Reaches Negotin Court
After two and a half years and two revisions of the indictment, the case against Dejan Dragijevic and Srdjan Jankovic reached Negotin's Higher Court, which has a month to schedule a hearing.
The case against Dejan Dragijevic and Srdjan Jankovic, charged with the murder of two-year-old Danka Ilic, reached the Higher Court in Negotin on September 2, 2026. That starts a one-month legal deadline for the court to schedule a preliminary hearing, which will be closed to the public.
The case landed in Negotin after the Appellate Court in Nis ruled on August 31, 2026, that the trial would not be held at the Higher Court in Zajecar, as originally planned, but at the Higher Court in Negotin instead. The indictment, filed after a supplemented investigation, charges Dragijevic and Jankovic with aggravated murder committed jointly, and prosecutors have asked the court to sentence both men to life in prison without parole.
The road from indictment to trial
This trial has been two and a half years in the making. According to the indictment, on March 26, 2024, Dragijevic and Jankovic were returning from a work assignment in a white Fiat Panda owned by the Vodovod utility company when they struck two-year-old Danka Ilic in Banjsko Polje near Bor. Jankovic was driving, with Dragijevic in the passenger seat. The indictment further alleges that the two men then agreed to remove the child’s body from the road, to kill her if she was still alive, and to hide the body so they would not be prosecuted over a traffic accident. Danka Ilic’s body has still not been found.
On May 5, 2026, the Appellate Court in Nis rejected the defense’s appeals and upheld the indictment against Dragijevic and Jankovic. In the same ruling, it threw out the part of the indictment concerning Radoslav Dragijevic, Dejan Dragijevic’s father, who had been charged with failing to report the crime and assisting the perpetrator after the fact; proceedings against him were discontinued. Confirmation of the indictment came only after two rounds of revisions, which the Appellate Court had ordered along with additional evidentiary steps, including a reconstruction of the events and a new hearing of the girl’s mother.
The defense’s arguments
In their appeals, defense lawyers argued that the case lacked physical evidence, that the body was never found, that forensic testing found no DNA or biological traces of the child either in the official vehicle or on items seized from the defendants’ homes, that there were no witnesses, and that the defendants had withdrawn their earlier confessions. The Appellate Court found these arguments unfounded.
According to reporting by B92, Dejan Dragijevic’s biological brother died on April 7, 2024, at the premises of the Bor Police Department, while the investigation into Danka Ilic’s disappearance was still underway.
The case now rests with the Higher Court in Negotin. The one-month deadline applies to scheduling the preliminary hearing, which will not be open to the public, while the start date of the trial itself remains unknown for now.
