Tekija: Drugs in Car Bumper, Driver Rams Police Officers
Border and Bor police seized 1,620 grams of marijuana hidden in a car's rear bumper in Tekija, near Kladovo. Driver Z. T. (1988) tried to flee and rammed officers with the car before his arrest.
Officers from the Border Police Directorate and the Police Department in Bor arrested a suspect identified as Z. T., born in 1988, a citizen of both Serbia and Romania, in Tekija, a village in the Kladovo municipality. He is suspected of unauthorized production and trafficking of narcotics, as well as assaulting an official on duty. The operation was carried out in cooperation with the Higher Public Prosecutor’s Office in Negotin, the Serbian Ministry of Interior announced on September 3.
The arrest came during a stepped up campaign targeting cross border crime. While inspecting the car the suspect was driving, officers found three bags containing a combined 1,620 grams of plant material resembling marijuana, hidden in the vehicle’s rear bumper so that it would not be immediately visible.
During the inspection, the suspect attempted to flee in the car. Border police officers stopped him, but not before he struck them with the vehicle several times, causing minor injuries. As a result, he faces charges not only over the drugs but also for assaulting an official.
The suspect has been detained for up to 48 hours. He will be handed over, along with a criminal complaint, to the Higher Public Prosecutor’s Office in Negotin, which will decide on further proceedings.
Accounts of the arrest differ on one detail. The Ministry of Interior and the broadcaster N1 report that a single person, Z. T., was arrested. The portal 021, however, refers to two arrested persons in the headline of its report on the same incident. The ministry’s statement, as the primary source, mentions only one suspect.
The seizure near Kladovo comes just days after srpske.rs reported on an arrest in Sremska Mitrovica, where 180 kilograms of marijuana and cocaine were found in an apartment. The two cases are not connected, but they point to a run of larger drug seizures registered by both border and municipal police in different parts of Serbia in recent days.
Alongside its statement, the Ministry of Interior released three photographs of the seized drugs and the vehicle in which they were hidden.
