SARAJEVO (Reuters) – Montenegro prosecutors have charged six people in absentia over the digging of a tunnel from an apartment building to the storeroom of a nearby court in Podgorica, the interior minister said on Friday, in what officials called an attack on national security.
While the diggers’ motives remain unclear, the storeroom in the capital’s Higher Court holds large amounts of confiscated drugs, weapons and other evidence related to court cases. The president of the court said weapons relating to five cases had gone missing from the room.
Interior Minister Filip Adzic said the work had clearly been planned for months and cost hundreds of thousands of euros.
He said four Serbian nationals who have left the country have been identified as the main diggers, assisted by two unidentified people and at least five more from Montenegro.
The six charged, none of whom are in custody, are accused of criminal association, serious theft and removal of evidence at the cost of the court and state.
One of those charged is a Montenegrin woman who hired the apartment. She is suspected of having links with an employee at the Higher Court and with some jailed members of a criminal gang, Adzic told a news conference in Podgorica.
“Most of these people are not from Montenegro and are not in its territory so they should be apprehended in cooperation with other countries and handed over to Montenegro so that we get those who have ordered this grave criminal act that inflicted damage on Montenegro,” Adzic said.
The tiny Adriatic country, which aspires to join the European Union, has been seen as one of the key routes for drug smuggling into Western Europe.
“We still cannot say what the real motive was but we are closer than we were at the start of the investigation,” Adzic said.
(Reporting by Daria Sito-Sucic; Editing by Hugh Lawson)
