Vucic: Serbia is among the safest countries in Europe

The President of Serbia, Aleksandar Vucic, said today that Serbia ranked among the safest countries in Europe because in almost two years there had not been a single mafia murder.

Vucic said that with the allegations about numerous spies in Belgrade recently, he had wanted to illustrate the collision of different forces within the interest zone of the Western Balkans, stressing that at no time Serbia's vital interests had been threatened.

Vucic, when asked whether, since espionage was a criminal offense, any of those persons had been arrested or expelled from the country, and whether, if this was not the case, it showed the weakness of the institutions, he clarified that Serbia had no authority over many of these people.

"When you say that someone is a spy, it's colloquial. Some people do that work legally, I didn't even say that everything is completely illegal. There are people in diplomatic and consular missions who do that work. I can tell you their positions in certain Digital Cadastral Plans, but what are you going to do with that? “To throw out 100 or 200 people like that,” he asked and added that even that work was done differently today than before and that some people had come with different intelligence jobs.

He repeated that there had been many such people from all parts of the world, and pointed out that it had not been information from the Security Intelligence Agency, as reported by some media, but from some other services.

"Our job is to do intelligence and counterintelligence work, and that's what the competent agencies are doing, protecting the safety and security of citizens. I am proud that we have managed to do that so far so that everything that is of vital interest to the state is never threatened," the Serbian president said.

He added that for almost two years, not a single or maybe one mafia murder had been recorded in the country, which did not exist in Europe, which made us one of the safest countries.

"That's what we deal with, and I said that (about spies) as a kind of paradox, to show how much there is a collision of different forces within the interest zone of the Western Balkans, and since Belgrade is the only big city in the Western Balkans, it is logical for them to be here", Vucic said.

And, when you identified these people and knew what they did, you could carry out your counterintelligence work, and all this did not speak of the incompetence of the institutions, but the exact opposite, Vucic said.