Predrag Popovic's Email to Prosecutors Leaked to Tabloids
Predrag Popovic asked Belgrade's Higher Public Prosecutor's Office whether it was pursuing a case over a Srebrenica banner at a football derby, and his email ended up in tabloids without a reply.
N1 journalist Predrag Popovic sent an email on September 7 to Belgrade’s Higher Public Prosecutor’s Office (VJT), asking whether the office was pursuing proceedings against one or more people over a banner reading “Pravac Potocari” (Direction: Potocari) and a flag bearing the image of Ratko Mladic, both displayed in the stands during the most recent football derby between Crvena zvezda and Partizan. The prosecution never replied. A few hours later, the contents of his email had surfaced in several tabloids.
“Pravac Potocari” was the order Ratko Mladic gave his soldiers as they entered Srebrenica on July 11, 1995. Serbia’s 2016 Criminal Code prescribes a sentence of six months to five years in prison for publicly approving, denying, or grossly minimizing genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. Those were the provisions Popovic cited when he put his question to the prosecution.
“I would like to ask you for information on whether your office is pursuing proceedings against one or more persons in relation to this.”
That, according to the material provided to the newsroom, was the wording of the question Predrag Popovic sent to the prosecution.
How the email reached the tabloids
A few hours after it was sent, the contents of the email were published in pro-government outlets, including a portion N1 itself had never included in its own report on the case. That raises the question of how tabloids obtained correspondence Popovic had addressed exclusively to the prosecution.
The Independent Journalists’ Association of Serbia (NUNS) said in a statement on September 8 that Popovic and N1 had been attacked over the inquiry to the prosecution by Informer, B92, Politika, Novosti, and Kurir. N1’s own report on the case names only two of those outlets directly, Informer, through a statement from its owner, and Kurir, while it describes the other outlets that carried the email only generically as tabloids.
Informer owner Dragan J. Vucicevic misrepresented Popovic, pairing the claim with the wrong photograph:
“This Predrag Popovic, this man from N1 who filed a criminal complaint against Red Star and Partizan fans who unfurled a banner at the Marakana stadium yesterday.”
Popovic never filed a criminal complaint against the fans. He had only asked the prosecution whether it had done so on its own initiative. He was nonetheless branded a “self-hating Serb” and a “Serb-hater” in the coverage. Kurir published the verbatim text of his email, and a trace left in the article shows the content had been copied directly from it. After the pieces ran, Popovic received serious threats.
NUNS wants the prosecution to establish accountability
NUNS called the case serious in its statement:
“It is particularly worrying that certain media outlets published the verbatim content of an email that was never published in N1’s own article.”
The association called on the Belgrade VJT to establish without delay who had access to Popovic’s email, how its contents reached the media, and whether anyone employed by the prosecution was involved. NUNS legal counsel Rade Djuric told N1 the case was unprecedented: “We have never seen anything like this before.” He said that if the Belgrade VJT does not open proceedings against itself, the matter should move to the Supreme Public Prosecutor’s Office, which has the legal authority to directly review the work of a lower prosecution office.
European Federation of Journalists president Maja Sever said she was deeply troubled by a scenario in which official correspondence ends up in tabloids, and insisted that institutions must function and that those responsible must be named:
“Institutions have a name and a surname. The law prescribes the responsibility of people, by name and surname, for a failure like this.”
Popovic’s case is not an isolated one. Serbian news portal Srpske vesti previously reported that journalist Marko Novicic had received death threats, prompting the Independent Association of Electronic Media (ANEM) to file a criminal complaint with the relevant prosecutor’s office. Threats and pressure against journalists covering sensitive subjects, including the glorification of war criminals, keep recurring week after week.
As of publication, neither the Belgrade Higher Public Prosecutor’s Office nor the Supreme Public Prosecutor’s Office had answered how Popovic’s email reached the media, or whether anyone from the prosecution was involved.
