The FBiH Police Administration Professional Standards Unit will ask the Disciplinary Commission to initiate proceedings against Zoran Čegar, the suspended Head of the Uniformed Police due to threats he made to journalists of the Center for Investigative Reporting (CIN).
Ensad Korman, Deputy Director of the FBiH Police, has informed CIN that the Unit had previously assessed the report of Čegar’s inappropriate behavior as founded.
In October 2022, Čegar, who was suspended, twice threatened the journalists who were investigating his property acquisition affairs. The first time, in a telephone conversation with a female journalist from Sarajevo, Čegar uttered a series of profanities, threatening that if she called him again, he would come to “the place where she was calling him from“. About twenty days later, he made even more serious threats in front of the Dubrovnik Municipal Court in Croatia, where he was being tried on charges of fraud. After the hearing, he insulted and cursed CIN journalists covering this process, threatening the female journalist twice to “rip her throat out“.
Both threats were reported to the police in Sarajevo and Dubrovnik and the Cantonal Prosecutor’s Office in Sarajevo.
In early November Zoran Čegar was suspended from the position of Head of the FBiH Uniformed Police Sector.
Mustafa Hujdurović, head of the Professional Standards Unit, explained that in addition to the disciplinary procedure for threats to journalists, the FBiH Police Administration Criminal Police Department is conducting another procedure aimed at verifying the allegations from the CIN story about Čegar’s real estate.
“We informed the Criminal Police Department, and they are now doing their part of the work. We’ve asked that everything you stated be checked through Interpol,” said Hujdurović for CIN.
In late October 2022, CIN journalists discovered, among other things that Čegar registered in the Cadastre of Ilijaš Municipality as the owner of someone else’s land by presenting documentation notarized in Loznica, which the Public Notary Chamber of Serbia described as “a gross forgery”.