A journalist is missing - he used to report death threats, he was attacked and his car was smashed because he is a "foreign mercenary": The search continues

Strong forces of police and gendarmerie have continued the search this morning for the missing journalist Stefan Cvetkovic in Bela Crkva. 

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Cvetkovic's disappearance was reported late on Wednesday when the car he was using was found. The engine and headlights were turned on, the door of the car was closed, and Cvetkovic's watch was found by the car which had a torn bracelet.

Nedim Sejdinovic, president of the Independent Journalists Association of Vojvodina (NDNV), said that Jovan Daja, the assistant president of the municipality of Bela Crkva, refused to postpone the municipal assembly session yesterday because of the event and named the case "a criminal murder".

It can be heard on the record of the session of the Municipal Assembly that Jovan Daja rejects the request of the opposition to postpone the session due to the disappearance of the journalist and said that many "criminal murders" weren't solved in the past and he sees no reason to postpone the session.

Sejdinovic said it was "creepy" that the local politician calls the journalist a criminal and declares him dead.

In the past few months, Cvetkovic claimed many times in public that he is working on a journalist research on the murder of the leader of Civic Initiative SDP, Oliver Ivanovic, which happened in January in Kosovska Mitrovica.

Journalist Stefan Cvetkovic from Bela Crkva has previously reported that he received death threats before, and he was physically attacked in 2008.

As Beta wrote, Cvetkovic was hit by a former police officer M.P in the head on July 18th, 2008, in Bela Crkva, and he was then arrested by the local police. As it is stated, he approached the table where Cvetkovic was sitting in a restaurant and he started cursing and threatening him, and he then hit him and escaped the scene.

Cvetkovic received a bruise under the eye, and the attack followed after "many dozens of threats" of M.P. The former officer was suspended when RTV TNT and then RTV B92 broadcast the video where he can be seen consuming narcotics. In may of the same year, Stefan Cvetkovic said to Beta that a dozen people attacked him and inflicted multiple hits when he was in the village Dupljaja, on the Gulasijada manifestation.

Foto: mc.rs, Facebook/Belocrkvanske Novosti

Cvetkovic said that a group of around 1o people in "a clearly intoxicated state" charged at him because he was filming thee Gulasijada and the incident they tried to cause. He then said that the same group of people provoked and cursed the leader of Social Democrats of Vojvodina (LSV) Nenad Canak, who also attended the manifestation.

He then said that the locals prevented that group from charging at Chanak, and when they saw he filmed the entire incident, they came after him. According to him, they first hit the camera first with a bottle, and then they surrounded him and hit him a few times, while the locals of the village prevented the incident to escalate.

Stefan Cvetkovic said in December 2015 that unknown perpetrators smashed his car, when local officials marked him as a "legitimate target", declaring him a "foreign mercenary". 

The journalist from Bela Crkva marked at the time that it is a direct reference to a "legitimate clearing of the foreign mercenary". 

"I am not prepared to back down in front of the wide system spread corruption and crime which collapses the foundations of our society. I still believe in the universal value: that it is possible to kill a journalist, but it isn't possible to kill the truth", Cvetkovic said at the time.

"As a drastic example, I am giving an example when the Assistant to the Mayor of Municipality, Jovan Daje, was a guest on a local radio, and he announced that I was a foreign mercenary, financed by Soros foundation based in Frankfurt, Germany", Cvetkovic told BETA.

Foto: Facebook/Stefan Cvetković

Cvetkovic reported a lot of death threats to him and his family in 2015, He added that the threats most often came from phone numbers from Novi Sad or abroad, and from multiple accounts on Facebook.

According to the data from Independent Association of Journalists of Serbia, on December 16th, 2016, Cvetkovic headed to the road in early morning hours, he saw the message "dead" on his car. He suspected that the threatening message has to do something about his reports about the criminal storages and burning of hazardous waste in Bela Crkva.

Cvetkovic reported to the Association that on January 30th, 2016, the former deputy Mayor of the municipality Bela Crkva, Marjan Aleksic, threatened him and that he broke his phone.

According to the eyes of the eyewitnesses, the incident took place in the restaurant Dunavski Cvet, in the place Stara Palanka, twenty kilometers from Bela Crkva. According to him, Aleksic approached the table where Cvetkovic was sitting with his colleagues from production group "Mreza" from Belgrade, and he threatened him verbally, and when he noticed that Cvetkovic turned on the phone to record the threats, Aleksic broke the display on his phone.

VIDEO: Look at the story Cvetkovic did and which was reported by Telegraf: 

(Telegraf.co.uk / Beta)