Konjuh drug raid officers write to Macut, 15 removed
According to a letter published by KRIK, removals in the anti-drug service began the day after the Konjuh seizure. The prime minister, police director and minister did not respond.
The investigative network KRIK published a letter on October 19 in which 13 officers of the Anti-Drug Service of the Criminal Police Directorate (UKP) tell Prime Minister Djuro Macut what happened to the service after the seizure of five tons of marijuana in Konjuh, near Krusevac. According to KRIK, about 15 supervisors have been pushed out of their posts, and the meeting they requested with the prime minister was never answered.
What the officers say in the letter
The group is led by the service’s former head, Radomir Popovic, and his deputy, Nikola Djokovic. The letter was signed by 13 officers, most of them with more than 20 years on the job. They asked the prime minister for a meeting in early September 2026, and they are turning to Macut over developments in the Interior Ministry (MUP) since Marko Kricak was appointed head of the UKP.
The signatories treat the date of the seizure as the starting point. They claim the service began to fall apart the very next day:
“Since that seizure, or more precisely the day after it, the destruction of the service has begun: the head of the service, the deputy head, the heads and deputies in all four departments of the service, and five section chiefs were removed.”
That, they write, was not the end. The officers say that after their removals, pressure began on their families as well: “After our removals, pressure begins and our wives who work at the MUP are being removed.” According to the letter, this also puts their safety in question, because, as they put it, they have been left alone against a criminal group:
“We have been left to fend for ourselves in the fight against a mafia that, because of the seizure in question, has lost hundreds of millions of euros a year and the entire logistics that had worked for years.”
The signatories remind readers that they ran the service for 11 years and took part in the 2023 international operation against the Balkan Cartel over the smuggling of more than seven tons of cocaine. The removals, they warn, “endanger all citizens of Serbia, and especially us, the signatories, and our families.”
Where the officers have been reassigned
According to KRIK, the supervisors who led the operation have been scattered across other parts of the police:
- Popovic was moved to the war crimes service
- Djokovic was shifted to the traffic police
- the others were assigned to the border police, the Administrative Affairs Directorate, the Technical Directorate, the Novi Sad Police Department and the corruption unit in Pancevo
KRIK also writes that nobody has explained to the officers why they were taken off the job after a successful operation. Kricak, according to the same source, became head of the UKP about a month before the seizure, in late December 2025.
How did the Konjuh operation unfold?
The investigation, according to criminal case files seen by KRIK journalists, lasted about five months. It began when police seized two tons of marijuana in Belgrade in August 2025 and arrested two lower-ranking members of the group. The trail led to Konjuh, where the storage site was the family home and farm of Nebojsa Spasojevic and his father Rade Spasojevic, a councillor of the ruling SNS party in Krusevac. According to KRIK, the marijuana was produced in North Macedonia and smuggled into Serbia.
First, on January 24, 2026, nearly 100 kilograms of marijuana were seized in a car heading from Konjuh to Belgrade. Five days later, on January 29, police raided the property and seized about five tons of marijuana, along with four automatic rifles and a “Zolja” rocket launcher. The father and son were arrested along with several associates. The man police and prosecutors identified as the group’s boss, Aleksandar Mijajlovic, fled Serbia, and Austrian police arrested him in July.
Serbian officers passed the information on to colleagues in North Macedonia, which led to the seizure of more than 40 tons of marijuana. According to police, these operations cost the group more than 150 million euros.
What officials have said
Police Minister Ivica Dacic and Kricak came to Konjuh in person. Dacic said at the time:
“The police director and I came here tonight to congratulate the Criminal Police Directorate on an outstanding operation (…), this is a record police seizure of narcotics.”
According to KRIK, the officers also requested a meeting with the police director and with the minister, but got no reply from either. Macut, as reported, had not responded to their request by the time the story was published. Neither KRIK’s story nor N1’s coverage of it includes a reaction from the MUP or the government to the claims in the letter, so the account of why the removals happened rests, for now, only on the signatories.
