Category: Violence against citizens
Period: from 4 Jul 2025
Outcome: No one investigated (as of 23 Aug 2025)
During the blockades in Belgrade on 4 July 2025, plainclothes men without ID detained citizens on the streets: a clarinet teacher in Stari Grad and a young man near the Church of Saint Sava, who was bundled into an Audi with no number plates. They were allegedly members of the JZO under the command of Marko Kričak, and the media name Nenad Marić, Marko Zafirović and Nenad Obradović. As of November 2026, we had found no report of an investigation into those detentions.
On 4 July 2025, a plainclothes individual detained a clarinet teacher from a Belgrade music school and two other citizens on Palmotićeva Street. He did not identify himself, although citizens and a lawyer asked him to. The lawyer says he led the detained man across the road against a red light. After giving a statement at the police station, the teacher was taken to the Misdemeanour Court in Belgrade.
According to citizens, the reason was a knocked-over rubbish bin, but his colleague says this is not true. He was allegedly arrested by JZO assistant commander Nenad Marić, who refused to identify himself. The Independent Union of Education Workers of Serbia demanded his release and an investigation into who abducted him.
That same afternoon, according to a student at the Faculty of Civil Engineering, three men bundled a young man into an Audi without licence plates near the Church of Saint Sava and drove him away. They did not identify themselves when the people gathered there asked them to. One of them, seen in a photograph from social media, is allegedly Marko Zafirović, then a department head in the JZO.
Zafirović and colleagues from the JZO also allegedly arrested a student who was with a fellow student on Bulevar oslobođenja, using a car with taped-over plates. The sources do not say whether this was the same incident.
The Stari Grad citizens' assembly reported that NPS councillor Mihailo Maletić had also been detained. NPS president Miroslav Aleksić told N1 that he had been arrested by the Security Unit run by Kričak and taken to the police station in Zvezdara, and that the arrests were being carried out by men without badges or insignia, recognisable by their tattoos. We found no official confirmation or outcome.
In the first week of July 2025, members of the unit allegedly arrested people on the streets of Belgrade, outside any jurisdiction but following their commander's order. Among the most prominent was allegedly Nenad Obradović, whom a photo shows arresting a lawyer outside the Faculty of Law; the arrests allegedly looked like abductions, carried out in plain clothes, without ID and from cars whose registrations were concealed.
In August 2025 it was argued that footage of the unit's members in action, published that summer, should be examined by the Internal Control Sector and the Ombudsman. We found no report of proceedings against the police officers who carried out the detentions.
After Kričak was appointed head of the Criminal Police Directorate in late December 2025, Marić allegedly became his deputy and Zafirović head of the Service for Combating Organised Crime. For the torture in the Government garage and the arrests of JZO members in November 2026, see the Kričak case.