One of the Democratic front (DF) leaders Andrija Mandic denied accusations Special Prosecutor’s Office charged him with, noting that this was a fabricated political case lead by the chief special prosecutor Milivoje Katnic in order to weaken the political alliance he belonged to. Mandic was questioned at the prosecutor’s office on Monday. He was suspected (along with his colleague Milan Knezevic) of being a part of an organised criminal group that prepared a terrorist attack on election day and a violent break into the Parliament, after which it would declare DF’s election victory and arrest former PM Milo Djukanovic.
“I had to warn the man that he is on the slippery slope and that he has ended up in a process of proving false state coup. In this case, one can only slip and it will not be DF,” Mandic told reporters after the hearing.
He repeated that this was a political process aimed at strengthening DPS and weakening the opposition, ie DF.
“The fabricated political case led by the chief special prosecutor will be broken into pieces because of only one reason – no one from DF did not have any evil intent on 16 October evening. At our rallies we spoke that people would not gather in front of the Parliament until each ballot was counted,” said Mandic.
He claims that he told Katnic he wanted to see how the special prosecutor would prove their guilt and relations with the suspects.
Mandic sees lifting his and Knezevic’s immunity as a violation of the law.
“The decision to lift my and Knezevic ‘s immunity is legally unfounded. And then, the following situation may happen – at the end of the trial, when a verdict should be announced, someone may remember that removing the immunity was not done in accordance with the Constitution and the law and that the entire case can fail. We do not want that,” said Mandic.
He will be heard again on 3 March and in the meantime, he says, he will appeal to the Constitutional Court.
“I want to prove that the Parliament Speaker violated the Constitution and the law and that the chairman of the Administrative Board dealt with forgery,” Mandic said.
He denied being in contact with Russian nationals suspected of preparing the terrorist attack.
“No one was in any contact with any foreign citizens Katnic mentioned. And it will be very easy to prove – that DF had no contacts either with the Russians, or the Serbian nationalists, or with anybody else. We publicly warned Montenegrin citizens on Tuesday, ie before Sunday when the fake coup occurred, that something was up. It represented live preventing a coup. That’s why we made the decision not to call on people to rally because we were able to assume that perhaps someone close to Djukanovic and Montenegrin regime was behind these ‘terrorists’,” Mandic said.
