Milosevic son threatened opponent with power saw

Former President Slobodan Milosevic’s son, who has fled to Russia, was sentenced in absentia today to six months in prison for threatening to kill one of his father’s political opponents with a power saw.

In March 2000, Marko Milosevic and six friends abducted Zoran Milovanovic, 21, a member of a youth group opposed to Slobodan Milosevic’s hardline policies.

They switched on a power saw and threatened to kill him with it if he did not reveal the names of supporters of his group, called Otpor, or Resistance, a judge in Milosevic’s hometown of Pozarevac said.

The incident was part of intense violence against Milosevic’s opponents in the months before his removal in October 2000 and subsequent extradition to the UN war crimes tribunal, where he is standing trial for alleged crimes committed during the Balkan wars of the 1990s.

Marko Milosevic, 30, fled to Russia shortly after his father lost power. He has failed to appear at several court hearings to answer charges that he and the six friends abducted and threatened to kill Milovanovic.

According to a court indictment, Marko Milosevic and his friends “threatened to cut Milovanovic into pieces” if he refused to reveal the names of other members of his movement in the town of Pozarevac, 30 miles south of Belgrade.

Five of Marko’s friends were also sentenced by the Pozarevac district court to six months in prison, while a sixth received a seven-month sentence.

Mirjana Markovic, Milosevic’s influential, neo-communist wife and the power behind the scenes during his rule, also fled to Russia last year. She is wanted by Serbian authorities who suspect she may have been behind the murders of other political opponents.

Marja Milosevic, their daughter, left Serbia for neighbouring Bosnia in 2002 after she received an eight-month suspended sentence for firing a gun at an official who negotiated Milosevic’s surrender to new Serbian authorities in April 2001.