Over two decades after high-ranking Montenegrin security officers Goran Zugic and Darko Raspopovic were shot dead, the killings remain unsolved but suspicions persist of links to police-protected cigarette-smuggling cartels......
High-ranking Montenegrin police officer Goran Zugic parked his car in the capital Podgorica for the last time on May 31, 2000. After he left the vehicle in a dark parking lot, a man came up from behind him with an automatic weapon. The gunman fired seven bullets into his back and three into his head, leaving him dead in front of the building where he lived. At the time Zugic was Montenegrin President Milo Djukanovic’s national security adviser, and the day after his murder, Djukanovic said that it was “a political attempt to undermine the country’s security”. “Those who shot him committed a terrorist act against democracy in Montenegro and the security of its citizens. Even we don’t know the real motives at the moment - the public perceives that it was political murder,” Djukanovic added. Thirty-seven-year-old Zugic began his career as a police officer in neighbouring Bosnia and Herzegovina, but his family fled to Montenegro when the war started there. In 1992, Zugic became head of the...
