Death Threat Against Vidojkovic, Kulacin Reported
ANEM reported a new death threat against Marko Vidojkovic and Nenad Kulacin to the Prosecution for High-Tech Crime, left in a comment under its own post about earlier threats against the two.
The Association of Independent Electronic Media (ANEM) reported a new death threat against Marko Vidojkovic and Nenad Kulacin to the Prosecution for High-Tech Crime on August 16. Vidojkovic and Kulacin host the show Dobar, los, zao and write columns for the newspaper Danas. The threat did not arrive by message or email. It was left as a comment under ANEM’s own Instagram post, one that had reported on an earlier death threat against the same two authors.
The comment came from an account called aleksandar.novitovic67 and said the two should be killed as soon as possible so they would stop writing. ANEM filed the report the same day the comment was noticed.
Veran Matic, chairman of ANEM’s Governing Board, a member of the Permanent Working Group on Journalist Safety and operator of the Safe Line for Journalists, said the pattern has now repeated for the third time.
“This is the third time that posts about death threats against these two authors have drawn new threats in the comments, which is especially worrying, because it is clearly targeted harassment and persecution aimed at intimidating both them and their families,” Matic said.
The threat, in other words, arrived as a response to the news that an earlier threat had been reported. The post meant to protect the two authors became the place from which the next one came.
What Happened Before This Report
ANEM reported the previous threat against the same two on July 27, from an account called lesicslobodan, left under a post on the Instagram account of the outlet Nova.rs. Alongside the death threat, the same account also posted a message containing an ethnic slur. Operators of the hotline for reporting threats and attacks on journalists said at the time that the same account had sent around ten threats that year alone, and that none of them had been prosecuted or sanctioned.
ANEM therefore asked the Prosecution for High-Tech Crime and the High-Tech Crime Unit of the Interior Ministry (MUP) to pay attention to several accounts from which journalists are threatened on an ongoing basis. The argument was practical: the identity of the people making the threats is easy to establish, because they do not even hide it.
How Many Cases Are Tied to Threats Against the Two?
Since 2019, prosecutors have opened 26 cases over threats against Vidojkovic and Kulacin. Only three have ended in a conviction, meaning 23 cases still have no outcome. Seven years of reporting against three convictions is a ratio that explains why ANEM follows every new report with a public statement instead of waiting for a response from the institutions.
The broader picture Matic laid out points in the same direction.
“We note that of the 111 cases open at the Prosecution for High-Tech Crime over the past year and a half, the perpetrator was identified and sanctioned in only one,” Matic said.
ANEM also noted that the process can move considerably faster. Threats made against the justice minister and the president of Serbia were resolved with arrests within days, so the difference cannot be explained by the technical complexity of the cases, since these are the same kind of offense handled by the same department.
What Is Being Asked of the Authorities
ANEM’s demand is short and leaves no legal room for interpretation:
“ANEM demands that the competent authorities process, as urgently as possible, all the threats that Vidojkovic and Kulacin constantly receive, in order to send a clear message that this kind of intimidation of media workers in Serbia is impermissible and punishable. We warn that these continuous threats, which endanger the safety of media workers, can have harmful and far reaching consequences,” Matic said.
ANEM also appealed to journalists to report every case in which their safety is threatened while doing their job, since such cases, it said, need to be logged and counted. A free hotline, 0800 100 115, is available for that purpose, through which media representatives can get an explanation of how the law treats such acts and what steps to take to get police and prosecutors to open a case.
A third report in a row is now sitting with the same prosecution that already has open cases over the first two. The account the threat came from is still public.
