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| - Six people charged with assisting in the murder of a moderate Kosovo Serb politician two years ago pleaded not guilty Tuesday at the start of their trial in Pristina. Oliver Ivanovic, one of the few in Kosovo's Serb minority to break ranks with Belgrade, was gunned down with six bullets to the back in 2018 just outside his party's headquarters in the flashpoint town of Mitrovica. "The murder was politically motivated," prosecutor Blerim Isufaj said. The six suspects, working as a "criminal group" were charged of "helping unknown suspects to commit the murder", he said. All six entered a not guilty plea after the prosecutor read the indictment. Those charged include four Kosovo Serb policemen, detained last year, who attempted "to hide and eliminate evidence" when they reached the crime scene, the prosecutor said. One of Ivanovic's close party associates, Silvana Arsovic, and another ethnic Serb were also indicted. Three other suspects, including Milan Radoicic, a local Serb businessman and political leader, who was named in the indictment as the group's mastermind, were not charged as they are on the run. Radoicic fled to Belgrade last year and Pristina had issued an international arrest warrant for him in connection with the murder. Mitrovica, a city ethnically split between its Serbs in the north and Albanians in the south, is known as a hotbed of organised crime, a plague that Ivanovic tried to expose. The defendants were seeking "financial or other material benefit, with the aim of extending control over businesses and politics in northern Mitrovica", Isufaj said. "Seeing now deceased Oliver as a deterrent and serious opponent, they organised his assassination." Ivanovic did not recognise Kosovo's independence from Serbia declared in 2008. But he was considered unusual among his ilk for efforts to build bridges with Kosovo Albanians, whose language he also spoke. He had long maintained that crime, not ethnic divides, was the biggest curse in impoverished Mitrovica. In off-the-record comments to media made public after his death, Ivanovic described how "informal centres of power" were calling the shots in the Serb half of Mitrovica. He named Radoicic as a key player in this underworld. ih/ljv
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