PODGORICA, 20.12.2018. – On January 15 The High Court in Podgorica will make a judgement on the alleged members of the group charged with the international smuggling of drugs in 2015, including journalist Jovo Martinović, and headed by Duško Martinović. The prosecution and the defense presented the closing arguments at this week’s hearing.
Journalist Jovo Martinovic, who is one of the suspects, who spent 14 months in detention, said in his closing remarks that he had been doing his journalistic work from the first day to the moment of the arrest.
“There is no mention of any drugs or anything related to illegal activities from the intercepted talks, but my desire to finish the French production film first. All my communication with Duško Martinović was done through a regular telephone line because I did not do anything illegal or any politically sensitive story about Montenegro”, said Martinović.
He also stated that the main prosecution was Namik Selmanović, who was granted the status of associate witness at the proposal of the Prosecution. The witness associate gave three statements, one before the prosecutor of 2015, who repeated it from word to word before this Trial Chamber in 2017. When the cross-examination came to light, the witness either did not remember or did not want to answer the questions.
Martinović emphasized that he thinks that the Special State Prosecutor’s Office “calculated and consciously forgave the drug dealer for his criminal offense in exchange for untruthful testimony, not against the organizers of a criminal group against whom they already have plenty of evidence, but against the inexcusable and non-conformist Western journalists.”
“I did not have absolutely no motive to go into any illegal activities, because of my personal beliefs about crime against which I have been fighting my whole life as a journalist, and because of all the dangers to which I was exposed”, he said is at the end of the appeal.