Zabela Prison Warden Arrested Over Alleged Cigarettes-for-Votes Scheme
Police detained Rodoljub Rončević, warden of Serbia's Zabela prison, on suspicion of giving inmates cigarettes and coffee to vote for one list on 25 October.
Police on Friday, 6 November, detained Rodoljub Rončević, the warden of the Zabela correctional facility in Požarevac, on suspicion of abuse of office and vote-related bribery linked to the 25 October parliamentary election. The arrest was ordered by the anti-corruption department of the Higher Public Prosecutor's Office in Kraljevo. Rončević has not been charged, and his side of the case has not been published.
What the police allege
According to the Interior Ministry, between 15 and 25 October the suspect, born in 1978 and from Smederevo, received 20,265 cartons of cigarettes for storage at Zabela. The cigarettes had been handed to the prison administration by the Justice Ministry's directorate that manages confiscated assets. Police say he then ordered staff to hand out cigarettes and packets of coffee to inmates as gifts, with the aim of getting them to vote for electoral list number one. Part of the cigarettes allegedly went to other prisons in Serbia.
He was ordered held for up to 48 hours and will be brought before the prosecutor together with a criminal complaint. RTS reported that criminal police had searched the whole prison and its grounds on 4 November, the day the Kraljevo prosecutors opened a case on reports that several Zabela officials had committed the same offences.
Ministry: presumption of innocence
The Justice Ministry, led in the caretaker government by Nenad Vujić, said it fully respects the independence of prosecutors and courts. It stressed the presumption of innocence and said anyone's criminal liability can only be established in a legal procedure based on facts and evidence.
Part of a wider case
The arrest comes days after the Organised Crime Prosecutor's Office opened a pre-investigation case on a complaint by lawyer Ivan Ninić, who alleges that prison wardens across Serbia pressed inmates to vote for list number one, and who names Vujić and more than 60 others. That case is separate and at an early stage; the ministry did not respond to N1's request for comment on it.
Sources
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