Vladimir Vuletic Found Dead in Sauna of Belgrade Apartment

Vladimir Vuletic, a professor at the University of Belgrade Faculty of Law and former vice president of FK Partizan, was found dead at around 3:40 p.m. on October 12 in the sauna of his apartment on Vladana Desnice Street in Belgrade’s Vozdovac district. The cause of death has not been established, and the body has been sent for an autopsy.

Police carried out an on-site investigation to establish the circumstances and the exact cause of death. As of Tuesday afternoon, neither the police nor prosecutors had issued an official statement on the cause of death.

Who found Vladimir Vuletic?

The case was reported to police on Monday afternoon. According to Belgrade media, four young men went to the apartment because the professor had not been in touch with anyone for three days. They told police they had a key to the apartment.

Once inside, they went up to the floor where the sauna is located and found its door locked from the inside or jammed. They forced it open and found Vuletic sitting, showing no signs of life.

Ambulance crews and police patrols were sent to the scene. Doctors could only pronounce him dead. The news site Telegraf reported that, according to initial unofficial information, the body showed no signs of a violent death. The autopsy is to establish whether the death was natural or violent.

Is his death linked to Veljko Belivuk’s group?

No state authority has linked Vuletic’s death to criminal groups. Since 2021, however, his name had come up alongside the investigation into the group of Veljko Belivuk, the leader of one of Partizan’s supporter groups.

On February 4, 2021, police arrested 19 suspected members of that group. Five days later, on February 9, Vuletic submitted his irrevocable resignation as vice president and member of the club’s board of directors. In the resignation letter, published on Partizan’s website, he wrote:

“For many years now, Partizan Football Club has been living through the hardest period in its history. The belittling, the degradation, the painful and systematic reduction of this club to something ephemeral and subjugated culminates these days in a wretched effort to criminalize a football club in the media and declare it a hotbed of organized crime in the Republic of Serbia”

Of those who were calling him out at the time, he wrote that they “pass judgment and hand down sentences with bared teeth, draw targets and call for a public lynching of some officials of Partizan Football Club, convinced that a university professor serving a term as the club’s vice president surely knew what they (allegedly) did not.”

What did Vuletic say after his questioning by the organized crime police?

The Service for Combating Organized Crime (SBPOK) questioned him on March 10, 2021, about his contacts with Belivuk and the supporters. That morning he had set out for the Prosecutor’s Office for Organized Crime to give a statement, but two police officers approached him in a cafe and asked him to come to SBPOK’s premises at once. The prosecutor’s office told the investigative outlet KRIK that it had not ordered the questioning. The interview lasted three hours.

“I am not a suspect. I was summoned as a citizen who has certain knowledge, but that knowledge concerns the institutional framework inside Partizan, not crime. I know nothing about crime”

That was how Vuletic described his position in a statement to KRIK. He also told the outlet what the inspectors had asked him:

“They asked me who communicated with Veljko Belivuk’s group, and in what way, that is, with the supporters, because the whole time they framed their questions in terms of supporters. I explained what the board of directors’ communication with them was like, what personal problems and threats I had, how many times I was in a position of receiving death threats from those very same supporters”

He also said that he had been told at SBPOK that he was being called in because of media reports, which he called scandalous. He ended his conversation with KRIK with this sentence:

“I firmly believe I am on a hit list together with your outlet, only because we pointed to several very important details about who created this (Belivuk’s) clan and who cooperated with that clan”

An audio recording also surfaced at the time of an alleged conversation in which Vuletic and Belivuk address each other in friendly terms. Vuletic claimed the recording had been edited.

Why did the Interior Ministry say in 2021 that he gave false information?

In June 2021, Vuletic handed SBPOK a photocopy of the minutes of a session of FK Partizan’s board of directors. He claimed the minutes showed that the restaurant and garden at the stadium had been leased for 15 years to a company called Mitona, and that the premises were used by members of Belivuk’s supporter group.

The Interior Ministry (MUP) said on June 23, 2021, that inspectors had checked those claims and established that the Partizan Sports Association had no contract with that company for the lease of the restaurant and garden at the stadium on Humska Street. The ministry described the information as untrue and ended its statement with the sentence: “We will talk to Mr. Vuletic about the reasons for supplying false reports to members of SBPOK.”

By his own account, he was questioned at SBPOK as a citizen, not as a suspect.

Who was Vladimir Vuletic?

He was born on November 28, 1978, in Sabac. He enrolled at the Faculty of Law in Belgrade in 1997 and graduated in June 2001. He earned his master’s degree in 2006 and his doctorate in 2010.

He worked at the faculty from March 2003, in the field of Roman law. He was elected assistant professor in March 2011 and later became an associate professor.

He joined FK Partizan in December 2014, when the club’s annual assembly elected him president of the supervisory board. He then served as vice president of the board of directors until his resignation in February 2021. That same year he founded the citizens’ association Movement Black on White.