Fourth Conviction in Ljubljana Case of Kidnap, Torture and Murder

By , 18 Jun 2018, 14:04 PM News
Ljubljana Court Ljubljana Court www.sodisce.si

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STA, 18 June 2018 - The Ljubljana District Court has convicted a fourth member of the gang that abducted and brutally tortured Zorica Škrbič, a 32-year-old woman whose abduction and death in June 2014 shocked Slovenia. 

After being acquitted in 2016 due to lack of evidence, Milan Trivković was sentenced to seven years and two months in prison in a repeat trial as the judgement was declared on Monday.

The sentence is not yet final and the defence has already announced an appeal, while the prosecutor Mateja Gončin, who had had sought almost ten years in prison for Trivković, is yet to decide whether to appeal.

Škrbić, the girlfriend of one of the pair convicted for the 2005 robbery of the SKB bank safe facility, was abducted by two men in broad daylight in the Ljubljana borough of Trnovo on 26 June.

She was found alive but badly injured the next day by the road on the southern outskirts of Ljubljana, where she was thrown out of a car after being subjected to hours of torture. She died before paramedics arrived at the scene.

The alleged motive of her abductors was to get the victim to tell them where the EUR 20m loot from SKB had been stashed. The stolen cash and other valuables have never been found.

Except for Trivković, the other three members of the gang involved in the abduction and torture pleaded guilty and were sentenced in September 2015.

Her torturers, Željko Petrović and Blagoje Sazdov, were convicted to 15 and 14 years in prison, while Senad Livadić was given two years and three months for having driven one of the cars involved in the abduction.

Trivković was now found guilty of complicity in the abduction and racketeering with the presiding judge Barbara Črešnar Debeljak saying that the evidence disproved his claims that he did not knew the other members of the ring.

However, Črešnar Debeljak said the that there was no evidence that the defendant actually participated in the victim's torturing, but he did drive the car with which Škrbić was taken to the torture spot.

The judge said that he also knew the spot, being that he lives nearby, which was also the main reason he had been recruited by the ring.

Since he showed the ring to the spot where they would be able to take the victim and because he knew what was to follow, the judging panel gave him the highest possible sentence for abduction.

However, due to a lack of evidence the panel did not take up on the prosecution's allegation that Trivković had been watching the victim before the abduction for a while to learn about her habits.

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