Lawyer Vasic: Scandalous decision on the detention of arrested Serbs; the prosecution did not present any evidence

Lawyer Dejan Vasic, the representative of Rados Petrovic, who was arrested together with Dusan Obrenovic by the Kosovo police in Zvecan on Monday, tells Kosovo Online that the decision of the Basic Court in Pristina to order them a 30-day detention measure is scandalous because the prosecution did not submit a single piece of evidence.

Vasic says that he has never encountered anything like this in his career so far.

"I have been working at the bar in Kosovo for 15 years. Behind me are countless politically staged and all kinds of criminal proceedings so that today I could say with all my heart that I have never encountered in my career such a request that I read today, which asked to determine the measure of judicial custody of Rados Petrovic, and Dusan Obrenovic. For someone to propose a defense and justify it with some compiled texts from newspapers and media reports without a single concrete proof, is something that is a political and moral scandal of the first category," Vasic says.

He announced that tomorrow he would file an appeal to the Court of Appeal against the decision of the Court in Pristina on the detention order.

"We will refer to an explanation given by the Constitutional Court of Kosovo regarding how a well-reasoned suspicion is shown, so I hope that someone will have at least a little legal sense and that the decision on detention will be changed," the lawyer says.

He adds that the charges against Petrovic changed from the day he was taken into custody until he was brought before the court.

"He is now accused of having committed the alleged criminal offense of subverting the constitutional order, which is the most serious of the four criminal offenses charged against him, with the exact same explanation referring to some completely different people who have nothing to do with him. The prosecution did not offer a single piece of evidence to the court. I would really like to know what, according to the prosecution, Rados Petrovic did, so that he is charged with subverting the constitutional order. I am sure that even the court does not understand this, but politics has always been only and exclusively force, and nothing else. And this is bare force trained on honest people," Vasic points out.

The crime for which Petrovic is suspected carries a penalty of up to 10 years in prison.