Ivan Ninić, the legal representative of the families of the victims of the “Panda” café shooting in Kosovo, has asked Serbia’s State Prosecutor General to intervene immediately and conduct an extraordinary review of how the Prosecutor’s Office for Organized Crime is handling the case.
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According to a document obtained by Radio Free Europe (RFE), Ninić claims that for more than three years, the prosecutor’s office in Belgrade has failed to respond to proposals to question several witnesses in connection with the case, which remains unsolved.
One of the people whose testimony has been requested is Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić. He has previously said that he has information about the killing of six young Serbs, who were murdered inside a café in Peja, Kosovo, in 1998.
Neither the Prosecutor’s Office for Organized Crime nor the Higher Public Prosecutor’s Office responded to questions RFE sent regarding the lawyer’s request. The office of Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić also did not respond.
On December 14, two masked individuals entered the “Panda” café in Peja and opened fire. High school students Ivan Obradović, Zoran Stanojević, Svetislav Ristić, Dragan Trifović and Vukosav Gvozdenović were killed in the shooting, along with university student Ivana Radović.
In his submission to the State Prosecutor General, Ninić emphasizes that in 2023 he requested the questioning of two former heads of Serbia’s State Security Service, Jovica Stanišić and Franko Simatović. According to him, the aim was to verify indirect information provided by witness Čedomir Jovanović concerning Simatović and what he may have known about the “Panda” incident.
Also in 2023, the lawyer proposed that prosecutors take testimony from Aleksandar Vučić. Vučić first mentioned the “Panda” killings in 2013, when he was serving as first deputy prime minister of the Serbian government.
In his statement at the time, Vučić said there was no evidence that Albanians had committed the crime and warned that the Serbian public would face shocking revelations.
In the years that followed, he said several times that some information existed about the case, but that the evidence was incomplete.
Ninić’s argument for questioning Vučić is linked to the government positions he has held. The request specifically mentions his leadership of the Bureau for the Coordination of Security Services since 2013, a position that has given him access to particularly sensitive security-sector information.
Acting on behalf of the victims’ families, the lawyer asked the State Prosecutor General to issue a binding instruction to the chief prosecutor of the Prosecutor’s Office for Organized Crime. It would order that Vučić, Stanišić and Simatović be urgently questioned as witnesses.
On July 27, Ninić also asked the Prosecutor’s Office for Organized Crime to investigate allegations that Radomir Boban Baćović was the direct perpetrator of the massacre.
The allegations were published on Telegram on July 18 in a video message by Miloš Medenica, a Montenegrin national who is a fugitive from justice.
Medenica, who was sentenced in Montenegro to 10 years in prison for organized crime, said Boban Baćović had been known since the 1990s as someone who worked for the State Security Service at the time. He also claimed that in 1998, when the conflict in Kosovo had escalated, the service devised a plan to stage an attack against Serbian civilians with the aim of creating legitimacy for military intervention.
The killing of the six young people of Serbian nationality took place during a period of intense interethnic tensions in Kosovo, when fighting between Serbian forces and the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) had already begun.
On the same day as the “Panda” killings, several KLA members were killed in an ambush by Serbian forces while transporting weapons from Albania.
At the time, the café attack was treated as an act of revenge, and Albanians were consequently arrested in Peja. However, 12 months later, a court in Belgrade acquitted all of them due to a lack of evidence.
In 2013, Vučić indicated that the perpetrators of the crime “may not have been Albanians.”
Serbian prosecutors began investigating the case in 2016, but the investigation has so far produced no results.
